Author Archives: Rick Neal

Monster Manual 2 and World Wide Game Day

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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First, a quick update about the World Wide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day this Saturday, May 23, at Imagine Games. As mentioned previously, we were too late to get the official support package for the day. However, we were able to get the adventure and maps needed to run the game, and I’ve got just about all the correct official minis, as well. What we don’t have are the official giveaways, so we’ll be making do with some unofficial ones.

If you’re in Winnipeg, and want to come play with some of the new monsters, we start at 12:30 pm at the store. If there’s enough interest, there will be a second session at 3:30 pm. If not, then not.

I look forward to seeing folks there.

And now, about the Monster Manual 2.

It’s a good book. It’s got some very nice additions to the monsters, along with some that I think they could have skipped. Of course, with a monster book like this, that’s always going to be the case, and my idea of a good inclusion is probably someone else’s idea of a waste of space.

A couple of specific thoughts:

  • Rust monsters. I hate ’em. Always have, always will. Yet, according to the official WotC site, they are fan favourites*. This incarnation is a little more lenient on character gear, but still are really just a “screw you” monster. There is a nice little catch to them, though, that might actually go some way towards addressing some of the magic item economy imbalances** – if you let a rust monster eat a magic item and then kill it and cut it open, you can reclaim the full value of that item in residuum. So now I envision places in Sigil and the City of Brass where you can take an unwanted magic item and have them feed it to a rust monster for you, kill the rust monster, and give you back full value, less the cost of the rust monster and a commission.
  • Demons and devils. These are always popular categories, and every monster book seems to have a heaping helping of new flavours. Sure, they’re useful monsters to throw at parties that are in areas that have few options for other creatures***, but that’s something that can be ameliorated by spending fewer pages on demons and devils and more pages on other monsters. I think we could do with less.
  • Angels and archons and elementals. We’ve got a solid base of these, now, which was needed. Let’s not fall into the same trap as with the demons and devils.
  • Metallic dragons. Welcome back, fellas! And my, aren’t you all bad-ass now?
  • Humans and Eladrin. More stat blocks for variations of both. Very welcome.
  • Half-Elves and Devas and Goliaths and Half-Orcs. Nice to have a few stat blocks for them.
  • Elves and Dwarves and Tieflings and Dragonborn and Halflings. Nothing new. I am sad.
  • Gnomes. I don’t like gnomes. Though my players hate them more than I do, so I still use them sometimes.
  • Formorians. Yay! I like these!
  • Firbolgs. Interesting take on them. I like it.
  • Beholders and Mind Flayers. Four new types of beholder, nothing new for the mindflayer. Huh.
  • Barghests. This version is very nice.
  • Gnolls. The new flavours make me happy.
  • Shadar-kai. Now extending up into the mid-Paragon tier.
  • Myconids. Now at least they don’t look like they should be dancing in a Disney movie.

Those are the things that really stand out to me. Anyway, as I said, a good book. Wizards is really keeping the production values high, and turning out some solid material for 4E.

I am pleased.

 

*What is wrong with people?
**Reclaiming residuum from a magic item through the disenchant ritual nets you 20% of the market value of the item in residuum. Enchanting a magic item costs 100% of the market value in residuum (or other components). Thus, it takes recycling five of an item to get enough materials to create an identical item. Also, selling magic items nets you 20% of the market value. So the question becomes, who makes such items, and how can they afford to sell them?
***”All the desert monsters suck. I’m just gonna throw a couple vrocks at the party.”

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Last time, I talked a little bit about the adjustments I was making because of a player on extended hiatus. Well, just to prove that I shouldn’t bother trying to plan things, he came back this session. I met with him before the game to talk about how we should handle it and we came up with the following story:

His character, a young human swordmage, has managed to gain an apprenticeship with an ancient and powerful eladrin swordmage. Training takes place at the eladrin’s sanctum in the Feywild. This master swordsman is very demanding and somewhat whimsical, and only allows his student leave at certain random times, and is prone to summon him back very abruptly. So, this allows the swordmage to pop in for a session through the magic of his mentor, and then get popped back just as suddenly, which allows for the character t come into play only when the player is there to play him.

Yeah, it’s kind of cheesy, but it addresses my primary concerns about the situation, namely that there is an in-game believable reason for the character to come and go session by session, mitigating somewhat the burden of multiple characters being played by one player.

It does create a bit of a situation in the encounters – do I build them for five characters, or for six? Do I adjust them when the sixth player shows up? I decided that, from now on, I’m going to build them for five characters (at least until we get six characters on a regular basis), and not adjust them if the extra character shows. Adding him in will make the fight easier, and will reduce the individual experience point awards. So, that means that when he shows up, the encounters are easier, which makes his contribution to the group a little more meaningful.

And I’m giving all characters the same experience point awards, whether they are in the session or not, so that he won’t fall so far behind as to be useless to the group.

The game itself was a little… let’s say scattered. It had been a while since most of us had seen our prodigal player, so a lot of the time was spent socializing and catching up. Also ordering and consuming food. I had expected the group to make it to the temple and begin scouting it this session, but no go. I realized fairly early on in the session that it just wasn’t going to happen, so I tried to drop some hints about the increased freqency of humanoid tracks in the area, and the fact that there were more than one type of humanoid group stomping around. This gave them some more information about the shadar-kai and their plot to organize the local humanoid groups into an army.

And then I threw a couple of fights at them.

I tossed a party of orcs at them on the plains, and ambushed them with gnolls and hyenas in the forest. The orcs were tough to put down, but not all that exciting in the fight. The gnolls and hyenas were a lot more fun for me, with their powers focused on swarming a single target and putting it down. I managed to give a couple of the characters some bad moments with those, and only the fighter’s Tide of Iron and the warlord’s Wolf Pack Tactics managed to control the positioning to give some relief to the targets.

And that was about it for the game. They managed to make it into the Trembling Wood near the temple, so that’s where we start next time.

And I’ve got some interesting things set up at the temple.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night was the first Post Tenebras Lux game with full attendance since the big changeover in players.

We picked up just after the battle with the stirges and the vine horror, and the group quickly found its way to the stone circle and barrow they were seeking*. What they found was a meadow about half a mile wide with a tall mound in the middle, surrounded by a ring of thirteen standing stones. Inside the ring of stones, it was winter, rather than the late summer it was outside. Not only was it winter, it was a nasty, blizzardy winter.

They walked the circumference of the circle, then tried to find a pathway leading in to the barrow. Crossing the perimeter of the stone circle inflicted cold damage on them. They had previously bought cold weather gear and potions of cold resistance, and used both at this point. I was a little surprised that they didn’t investigate the standing stones at all – I had set it up so that the stones could be manipulated (or destroyed) to turn off the killing cold. The normal cold would still have been there, but not the cold damage.

So, into the blizzard within the circle. This was the maze of ice and snow that they had been warned about back in Witchwood – I set it up as a skill challenge to find their way through the disorienting snow and ice fog, around the shifting walls of ice, and avoiding the illusionary creatures and traps within the maze. The turns were set up to be five minutes each, with one check per person per turn, and everyone also needing to make an Endurance check each turn to avoid losing a healing surge. Also, each turn inflicted 1d6+3 cold damage. The potions ameliorated some of the damage each turn**, and the cold weather gear granted a bonus to the Endurance check.

They made it to the barrow in two turns, with a couple of people losing healing surges along the way. I expected them to take another two turns or so to open the large stone doors of the barrow, which would have meant that the potions would have worn off, but the tiefling rogue pulled off an amazing Strength check to heave the slabs open.

The room inside was a trap fest. I used the elite ice sheet hazard, the elite version of the crossbow turret trap, and the whirling blades trap, all from the DMG***. The ice sheet was a frozen stream running across the battlefield, and the room was studded with timbers holding up the ceiling and, incidentally, offering cover to the crossbows.

Of course, this meant they also offered cover from the crossbows, but I hadn’t thought of that. Oh, well. Can’t complain if the characters use my own tricks against me.

The restricted mobility created by the ice sheet and the timbers slowed this encounter down a little, as did the widespread placement of the crossbow turrets in the four corners of the large room. Still, they soldiered through pretty well, though the large amount of damage dished out by the whirling blades scared them pretty badly.

Now they were in to the dungeon crawling portion of the evening. Having been very frustrated with the way dungeon crawls worked in Rescue at Rivenroar and the Age of Worms Adventure Path, I’ve been using a more abstract system of doing them. I flowchart a number of encounter areas – five in this case, of which I expect them to work through three or four – and make up description for the rest. For example, the first dungeon room had two ways out. They chose one path, which led them to the feast hall and the next encounter. But it didn’t lead them directly there; instead, I described how the path spiraled and descended, moving through warrens of work rooms and storage rooms, all full of rotted or destroyed furnishings and goods. They searched the area and rolled well, so I let them find a treasure package I had prepared: a carved ivory flute in the remains of a workroom, and a potion of healing in the ruins of an alchemical lab. The path led them on to the kitchen, where they made some good perception checks and heard the ghouls on the far side of the door.

That was the feast hall, and I’d set up what looked to be a pretty good fight****, with a large, U-shaped rotting banquet table taking up part of the room and a burning coal fire pit taking up another good chunk. But all the creatures were undead, and the party had a paladin of Pelor, a cleric of Pelor, and an avenger. Plus a sorcerer with the Lightning Breath power to set up a nasty sustained zone, and a rogue and a ranger that just usually do a lot of damage.

The fight was pretty quick, and the party was never really in any danger, despite the incredible leaps of the ghouls***** and the charges of the famine hounds.

That’s where we left it, with them about half-way through the dungeon, racing the setting of the moon, and starting to get concerned about their healing surges and daily powers. The last half of the dungeon should be an interesting challenge.

There wasn’t much in the way of NPC interaction, what with no actual NPCs showing up, but the mood and the play style from the previous session seems to be carrying over. The players seem to be having fun, and the game looks like it’s turning out to be the kind of game I like to run.

That makes me happy. 

 

 

*Good rolls on the skill challenge.

**According to the Adventurer’s Vault, the resist potions produced effects that lasted until the end of the encounter. I wanted to put a little more of a time limit on that, so I ruled that they would last fifteen minutes – three turns of the skill challenge.

***900 xp – a level 3 encounter for 6 characters.

**** 2 ghouls and 4 famine hounds, 900 xp, another level 3 encounter for 6 characters.

*****I swapped the trained Stealth skill that the ghouls come standard with (and that I didn’t want to use in this situation) with the trained Athletics skill, giving the ghouls a +9 skill check which let them jump over most of the dangerous or inconvenient terrain. Their first turn, one of them leaped over the fire and the table to land right in the middle of the party. It made me grin.

Obligatory Star Trek Review

By | | What's he watching?
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Yeah, I’m a geek with a blog, so I pretty much have to tell you what I think about the new Star Trek movie, right?

I liked it.

Actually, I liked it quite a lot.

Lots of other places will give you all the talk that I could about the way the cast really works well together, or how the visuals are amazing, and all that other stuff. I agree with it, though I’d like to relate the following discussion between my friend, Chris, and I as we sat in the theatre:

Chris: Count the lens flairs. I think that’s going to be the new geek drinking game.

Me: Okay.

Me, three minutes into the movie: I’ve already lost count.

Me, thirty minutes into the movie: If this is the new geek drinking game, the geeks will be dead of alcohol poisoning before the Enterprise reaches Vulcan.

Still looked great, though. And for the first time, the Enterprise (and other Federation ships) actually had interiors that made them look like functioning vessels.

But that wasn’t the stuff that really sold me on the movie, much as I enjoyed it. I’m going to be rather oblique in the next few paragraphs in order to avoid spoilers.

What I really liked was the way they took chances with the story, making some big changes to the Star Trek universe in an effort to build a firm foundation for the franchise to continue*. It was a risk, a huge risk, given the entrenched fandom and following that Star Trek has**, and the number of those fans who are heavily invested in the continuity of the franchise, in all its incarnations***. If J.J. Abrams had made a misstep with how he handled those changes, if the movie had been not quite as good, it could have blown up in Paramount’s collective metaphorical face.

He didn’t, though.

He treated the deviations from pre-established canon with the understanding and explanation they deserved. He made the big changes big on screen, showing an awareness of what he was doing, and what he owed the legacy of Star Trek. And he dealt with the ramifications and fallout from those changes in a way that left me feeling, “Wow. It’s all new again. I wonder what they’re going to do next?”

Hell, he made me want to run a Star Trek game.

I’m going to go see it again, maybe one evening this week, maybe this weekend.

Maybe both. I liked it that much.

 

 

*I almost said, “firm foundation for the franchise to unfold,” but that would have just pushed the alliteration over the brink.

**The Onion had a neat little segment on it.

***Fans like me, in other words.

World Wide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day – Monster Manual 2

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Saturday, May 23, is the next World Wide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day, this one celebrating the release of the Monster Manual 2. Once again, I will be running games at Imagine Games and Hobbies here in Winnipeg, starting at 12:30, and continuing pretty much until closing time. I’m scheduling one session starting at 12:30, and another at 3:30, if there’s still people wanting to play.

But there’s a catch.

Due to… stuff, we’re not sure if the support package from Wizards of the Coast is going to make it to us in time.

What does that mean to you, the gaming public? Well, what it means is that I’m going to download the character sheets from the site above, take the basic idea of the adventure that they’ve released, and use the Monster Manual 2 (when it arrives on May 19) to create my own scenario.

Now, we’ll still have some free stuff for people who come down to play, and we’ll still have an adventure using brand new monsters, but they won’t be the official ones.

But doesn’t that make it feel tantalizingly illicit and tempting?

C’mon down. Play with me.

Hit Points – A Good Question

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Got some e-mail from one of my players a short time ago. She is relatively new to gaming, and had this question about our Post Tenebras Lux game:

Question re Verisimilitude in our game: when in combat and get chomped or stabbed or whatever, do the healing mechanisms of the game (potion, healing surge, etc.) totally heal such a wound instantaneously, or would my character need some time to fully heal after the initial healing effort (of spell, potion, etc.)? Wondering how to role play that sort of thing. Seems in the geek-type game we were playing, wounds & near death in battle carried no consequences beyond the combat scene.

Most of the players in my group don’t think too much about hit points and what they represent, anymore. Hit points are, we know from our years of experience, how much damage you can take before you die. When an attack hits you, you lose hit points, so you’re getting hacked to pieces, or nibbled to bits, or fried to a crisp.

Except that’s not true. That’s the way we treat it, but that’s not the way they work.

4E went out of its way to emphasize the fact that we have moved beyond that in the game. Hit points represent everything that lets you keep fighting. When you run out of hit points, you don’t necessarily die. You fall down*.

And mostly, you then get back up again**.

Looking at the mechanics of the damage and healing system in 4E, it’s obvious that this is where they want the paradigm to be. And I, like most experienced gamers***, glossed over that and just paid attention to the mechanics.

Until my player reminded me of the other side of things: how does this look in play?

She got me thinking about it, and I sent her an answer, along with a request to post her question here. Because I think it’s a good question, from three different angles:

  1. The actual question itself asks for information that I want the players to have, and to act on.
  2. The fact that she had to ask shows how I’ve overlooked talking about this aspect with my players.
  3. Her perception of the “geek-type” game showed the underlying assumptions that I, and the other players, were working with.

So, I am including my answer to her. This is how it works in my game; I don’t claim that this is the proper way to do it, or the official way to do it. This is the way I do it.

Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Technically, most of the “damage” you take is not, in fact damaging. When you reach half hit points, and become bloodied, you can be assumed to have a cut or two, maybe some bad bruises or broken ribs. When you drop to 0 hit points or below, you are more seriously injured, with a penetrating wound or a cracked skull or serious blood loss or something else that takes you out of the fight. Even this is usually just you getting knocked unconscious or being overcome by pain. You’re really only taking serious physical damage if you run out of healing surges.
 
Hit points, more than physical damage, represent your ability to continue fighting – things like fatigue, morale, will, a good edge on your weapons, the condition of your armour, etc. When someone “hits” you for 10 damage, that may not break the skin (and probably wouldn’t at high levels), but may cause the grip of your sword to twist, or knock the breath out of you, or numb your arm for a second, or just make you feel totally outclassed. It’s not necessarily actual physical damage until you get bloodied, and then again when you drop to 0 hit points.
 
Each character has a number of healing surges per day that represent their ability to pick themselves up off the mat and go on. You can think of it as your physical and mental reserves. All – okay, not quite all, but just about – healing effects, whether natural or magical, draw on your reserves as represented by healing surges. When these run out, you can’t recover anymore, because your body and will are at their limits. This is when you take an arrow to the neck and die instead of having it bounce off your metal cap, knocking you unconscious.
 
So, really, the healing mechanisms generally heal most wounds completely, because they aren’t all that serious. Only when you’re out of healing surges do the wounds become serious enough to warrant time to recover from them. So, if you’re looking at when to play the idea of being wounded and worn out by combat, look to your healing surges. When you only have a couple left, then your character is probably starting to droop physically and to quail mentally. That’s when your armour is looking beat-up and bloodstained, and you may be sporting a bandage or two or limping a little. None of that has any game effect, but does add to the roleplaying.

And there you have it.

 

*Interestingly (to me, at least), this was how Toon handled running out of hit points.

**Very like a Chumbawumba song.

***Well, the ones I know, anyway.

The Amber Game

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Say that name among my players, and it generates a nostalgic pause, a wistful silence, and a sad smile.

We’ve played games that lasted longer, that worked out better, that were just plain more fun, but the Amber game is the one we look at as our greatest moments in roleplaying.

Also, our biggest headaches in gaming.

It was a grand experiment for us, and, while not an unmitigated success, really colours pretty much every game we’ve played since in one way or another.

For those of you who are unaware of the game, Phage Press released a book called Amber Diceless Role-Playing back in 1991. It was – in my opinion at the time – a truly brilliant evolution of the roleplaying game. See, when they talked about it being diceless, they didn’t mean they used playing cards or coin tosses or any other sort of randomizer to take the place of dice. Nothing in the game was randomized. And everything was focused on character development.

Very intriguing to me at the time.

Well, I bought the book, and the sequel Shadow Knight that came out in 1993, and several issues of Amberzine as they became available. Not only did I love the idea of the game, but also the setting, which was based on one of my all-time favourite series: Roger Zelazny‘s* Chronicles of Amber.

It took a while before I found a group that was willing to give the game a try. When I did, I jumped for joy.

Our campaign lasted just over a year, running 13 sessions. It gave us some of the best and worst moments in our collective lives as gamers.

See, the Amber game was immensely demanding, not only of the GM, but also of the players. It strained our abilities, and stressed our friendships. And then, right when you think you’re ready to pack it all in, it hits you with such a brilliant, untouchable moment of roleplaying that you forgive it all its foibles.

I loved it and I hated it. It made me a better roleplayer, a better GM, a better writer, and drew all of us who played it closer.

And I will never, ever, EVER run it again**.

It came close to killing me, I think. I was so stressed out about the games that I sometimes had nightmares about them. Still, I soldiered on, until the laptop on which I had been keeping a vast database of game information crashed its hard drive and I lost it all. When I found out how much it was going to cost to recover the data, I couldn’t justify it. Not just for a game.

So Amber died.

That, I think, may be my biggest regret about the whole situation – that the decision to end the game was kind of forced on me, and I wasn’t able to bring things to a close and exit with any kind of dignity. Nope. Computer crash equals game crash. No closure, no warning. Just bam.

At the same time, I was a little relieved. It lifted a huge burden from my mind and my time, but I didn’t want it to happen that way.

None of us regret the Amber game. We all still talk about it from time to time, which is why I’m writing this. Indeed, every now and then, someone starts pestering me to run it again. We’d all be better at it, they say; we’d make it easier on you; you’re a better GM now, it wouldn’t be so hard…

I say to them, “Here’s the books. You run it. I’ll play.”

And then they look at me with fear in their eyes and change the subject. Because they remember how much work it was to run.

What’s wrong with Amber? Well, I’ll tell you, but I expect that there will be an outcry from those who love the game. And those who love it love it so very, very much. But here’s what I found to be problematic:

  • The game sets up a default adversarial relationship between the GM and the players. All through the books, it emphasizes that the GM is going to try and mess with the characters, and that he or she will use all sorts of dirty tricks to do so. I don’t like that; it creates a lack of trust that I find almost essential to good roleplaying. And it leads the GM to begin to consider all the ways to screw over the characters – and the players.
  • The lack of randomization. At first, it doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but sometimes its nice, as a GM, to let the dice decide. Players respect the dice; they don’t always respect the GM saying, “No.” See, what I found happened was that the players would try something, I’d think about whether or not it should succeed, based on what I knew to be arrayed against them, and say, “It doesn’t work.” And they would try it again, in a slightly different manner. Or they would ask why. Or they would argue with me. And then everything would grind to a halt for the ten minutes (or fifteen, or ninety) that were necessary to get over this hump, when a simple die roll – even if I had made it behind a screen and they never saw the number – would have had them thinking, “Huh. Guess I just didn’t roll well enough.” This is tied to the first point, of course.
  • The GM is responsible for all the stats. Including the characters’ stats. After character creation, the characters never really know what their stats are again. This makes sense, to a degree: you may know you’re strong, but how do you know you’re stronger than Bill? All you know is that, the last time you arm wrestled, you beat him. But maybe he’s been going to the gym, and maybe you’ve let yourself go, and maybe you’re not sure if you can beat him this time. So, yeah, it makes sense. But it’s a huge pain in the butt, both for the bookkeeping to keep everything straight once characters start progressing, and to compare stats between two opponents to see who wins.
  • Trying to work my head around the n-dimensional physics of the universe, so that I had a decent idea of what was and was not possible with the multiple parallel worlds on different timestreams. Now, you don’t really need to do that, but I wanted a solid enough concept in my head about how the Shadows worked that I could come up with consistent, interesting, and understandable guidelines about what you could or could not do. And then, of course, once I had generated my idea of how it worked, trying to explain it to my players was another huge hurdle.
  • The game sets up a default atmosphere of distrust and paranoia among the players. You don’t just roll up characters, or build them with points and a shopping list, you actually have to bid against the other players to see who’s strongest, who’s got the most powerful magic, etc. And that can lead to rivalries and feuds right from the get-go.
  • You pretty much need to read at least the first five books of the Chronicles of Amber to understand the underlying physics and assumptions of the game world. We had a player or two that didn’t and it made for a lot of explaining.
  • Sometimes, there were just too many options. There was more than one game session spent with the characters (and players) sitting around and coming up with plans for quite literally hours, and then putting them into action when we had maybe an hour left in the session. This was because of all the things their characters could do, and all the things they had to account for their adversaries doing.

Now, having said that, there are some things about the game that I absolutely loved:

  • It was wide open. You could create pretty much any type of character you wanted***, with whatever sorts of abilities you wanted, living in whatever sort of world you wanted. And it would all work together.
  • Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, took a back seat to character development. And not in the matter of stats; it was all about building your character’s story. Everyone managed to weave interesting, surprising, and just plain awesome stories for their characters out of the play sessions.
  • The banter. We kept a quotes page, because of the neat back and forth that came out of the game.
  • The concept of the contributions. Rewarding people for making the game better for everyone – keeping track of the quotes, writing diary entries or stories, creating their own trumps, bringing nice snacks to the game… All that stuff.
  • The amazing highs that came when the game was working.

Yeah, we still think about Amber. We still talk about it. Many of the catch phrases in our gaming group hearken back to the Amber game. And we produced a fair quantity of interesting material. The site still exists, maintained out of nostalgia and respect for what we accomplished with the game.

Go check it out.

 

 

*I had the great good fortune to meet Mr. Zelazny shortly before his death, and got to tell him how much I enjoyed his work. He was a very gracious, generous author.

**Seriously. Never.

***Including a parachuting narwhal. This one I showed to my players as a cautionary tale of what I would not allow.

Arcane Power – A Short (Well, It STARTED Short…) Review

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Arcane Power for D&D 4E came out last week, and now that I’ve had time to read and digest it, I thought I’d share some thoughts.

Overall, I really like the book. One of the interesting things to see creeping into these supplements are sidebars and sections aimed specifically at adding flavour and roleplaying options to the various mechanical options presented. For example, the sidebar on Bardic Virtues on p 15 of the book talks about how the choice of virtue you make for your bard can guide character development and play. The section on adding quirks to familiars on p 141 is another good example.

Why do I like this? Because it’s redressing what I ‘ve seen (and blogged about) as a bit of an imbalance in the material for 4E so far. Options that play to non-combat situations, options that speak directly to roleplaying. It makes me very happy to see these becoming more prevalent in the system.

Anyway, I thought I’d go chapter by chapter through the book and give you my thoughts.

Chapter 1: The Bard

I’ve always liked bards, but I’ll admit that the jack-of-all-trades approach that’s been taken in the past has seriously reduced their effectiveness in combat situations, and generally made them unbeatable in social situations (Why is that a problem? Because in social situations, everyone just says, “Let the bard do our talking for us.”). I’m cautiously pleased with the 4E implementation of the bard, and the additionaly juicy bits added in Arcane Power make it even more pleasing to me.

The Virtue of Presience class feature is very nice, and fits in nicely with the previous bardic class feature choices. The new powers do a lot to continue making the bard a resourceful, sneaky, talented character, with a lot of interesting and surprising options.

The Paragon Paths presented also do a lot to show off the different facets of the bardic character, ranging from singing warriors to cunning tricksters to skilled diplomats to holders of secret lore. I was happy with the bard before this book; now I’m very happy.

Chapter 2: The Sorcerer

To be honest, I was less thrilled with the 4E implementation of the sorcerer, mainly because I wasn’t all that taken with the choices of Spell Source in the PHB2. Neither Wild Magic nor Dragon Magic really caught my fancy. The addition of Cosmic Magic is interesting to me, but I really like the Storm Magic source. Just reading about it made me start thinking about a character to create*.

The new powers continue to differentiate the sorcerer from the other arcane classes very nicely. They make the point that, while the wizard learns magic and the warlock bargains for magic, the sorcerer is magic. There’s also a very nice sidebar called Sorcerers in the World that gives some nice insight into where sorcerers fit.

The Paragon Paths continue the focus on the sorcerer as magic, showing a number of different ways that sorcerers can proceed to manifest more magic that is tied closely to who and what they are. Nothing is really remarkable among the new paths presented, but all seem solid and flavourful.

Chapter 3: The Swordmage

Up until the avenger class came out in PHB2, the swordmage was king of the “gotcha” moves, with sweet little tricks like aegis of assault and lightning lure right from the get-go. Now, with the new aegis of ensnarement, they may have reclaimed the crown from the avenger. The idea of snatching a foe out of combat and teleporting him right next to you has an immense appeal to me.

The powers seem to have a lot of different ways to move foes around on the battlefield, as well: pushing them, pulling them, sliding them, and swapping positions with them. They work together nicely to give the swordmage some good battlefield dominance to go with his decent attacks and defenses.

As with the sorcerer, the new Paragon Paths are nothing truly spectacular, but do show different ways of envisioning a magical swordsman, and different ways you can take your character.

Chapter 4: The Warlock

Man, I’ve loved the warlock ever since it debuted in Complete Arcane in 3E. Not so much the leather-clad, bad-boy image, but the idea that magic is an exchange, a transaction between the caster and the power source. I loved the pacts offered in the PHB and FRPG, and was looking forward to the new Vestige Pact.

I was not disappointed.

In fact, it pretty closely mirrors what I’ve been doing with my 3E warlock in a game one of my friends is running, and that I’m having a lot of fun with. The implementation in Arcane Power produces a lot of the same sort of flavour I was aiming for when I made Dunael, and decided that his powers came from a wide array of pacts that he has made with the small gods and forgotten spirits of the world.

So, yeah. I like the Vestige Pact.

The book addresses one of the only weaknesses I found in the design of the warlock class: one feels a little constrained to take only powers related to the pact one has chosen. Most of the warlock powers in this book don’t have a specific pact identified in their title, and there’s a nice sidebar on p 77 that goes out of its way to tell you that you can pick whatever powers you want, no matter what pact you’ve chosen. It really opens the field up. And the fact that there are a few new powers with slightly different effects depending on your pact really adds to the flexibility. Kudos.

The Paragon Paths for warlocks have a couple of real gems among them, in my opinon. Personally, I was quite taken by the God Fragment, Entrancing Mystic, and Storm Scourge. That said, it’s because they play to my weak points, rather than anything really outstanding about them.

Chapter 5: The Wizard

Summoning. Illusions. Magical tomes. A new way to use the orb. All good stuff, and giving the wizard back some of the wide range of abilities that was their hallmark in 3E, without letting them be all things to all people, as sometimes happened in 3E. Wizards in 4E can either be generalists, with a little bit of ability in a wide range of disciplines, or specialists, with a deep knowledge of one discipline at the expense of the others. It’s not a new idea, it makes a nice balance, and I’m pleased to see it come back into 4E, so wizards aren’t just about blowing things up.

Though they can still do that, if they choose.

The new powers for summoning and illusions are very nice. Summoning is pretty straightforward – you get a creature that does your bidding with each summoning spell. Illusions, however, really come up with interesting ways to do things in the game, from moving your targets around to impeding their movement to inflicting conditions on them to direct damage**. I like it.

The Paragon Paths, again, show some interesting ways to specialize***, but don’t break any really new ground. Well, except maybe for the Weaver of Chance, with an existential outlook and some interesting entropy mechanics.

Chapter 6: Arcane Options

I’m not going to say too much about the feats: they’re pretty standard. None of them looked bad, but none of them jumped out and grabbed me. Decent stuff, and more options are always welcome in my game.

Familiars, though. I see great potential in the 4E treatment of familiars. They’ve taken to heart the fact that many players just forget about or ignore their familiar until they need it to do something, and built a mechanic and functionality for the familiar that embraces the issue. Familiars are, by default, assumed to be in passive mode, where they can’t be hit, can’t be hurt, and can’t do anything, except grant their masters a bonus. They can be switched to active mode, where they can do more, but become more vulnerable. See? It goes away when you don’t need it, and comes out when you do. And it’s part of the game now, not just you forgetting about that toad in your pocket.

There are also some good tips on customizing and roleplaying your familiar, with some suggestions for quirks for each of the different types of familiar. And, of course, a list of 12 different familiars to get you started****.

The Epic Destinies here are interesting. They include (among others) the Archlich, the Fey Liege, and the Sage of Ages, giving an interesting assortment of abilities and powers, along with some very nice background flavour in the fluff. I generally like the new Epic Destinies that WotC is putting in the supplements; I thought there weren’t enough in the PHB.

The magic item section is all about magic tomes, the new implement for wizards. Lots of magic tomes. Many have interesting powers. Not much more to say about that.

The new rituals are all quite nice. There are a couple reprints (with some modifications) from a Dragon article, but the majority of them are new and interesting. There are even a couple more bard-only rituals.

The book closes with a page of arcane backgrounds. I like the background system for 4E, and these options are nice additions.

So, there you have it. Arcane Power is a good book. I like it. I’m glad I bought it.

I’m sad that I couldn’t also buy a pdf of it, but that’s a discussion that’s been hammered into the ground on way too many sites, so I’m not going to say any more about it.

 

 

 

*I’m the only one in our group running 4E. The other GMs are running 3E in various forms. This means that me coming up with 4E character ideas is just a sophisticated and subtle mental torture.

**Usually psychic damage.

***That is, after all, what Paragon Paths do.

****Dragon Magazine has an article with another 31 familiars, including some only available at Paragon and Epic tiers. You need a D&D Insider subscription to read it.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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We did a bit of character adjustment for the latest session of Storm Point. One of my players is on an extended hiatus, due to real-life demands that take precedence over gaming. While we thought that he might be able to drop in on an occasional session, we kept his character active, played by one of the other players. This was primarily so that, if he managed to make it out to a game, we wouldn’t strain credulity too much by having his character join the group*.

The downside of this is that there is always one person playing two characters, which can get burdensome.

So, before the party headed off on the latest adventure, the players and I had a talk, and decided that Milo was going to sit this one out. When his player comes back, he’ll rejoin with experience equal to the rest of the party, but this alleviates the two-character burden somewhat.

Anyway, my goal this session was to resolve the storyline with the ambassador, get the party the information they needed to pursue the shadar-kai angle they were looking into, and get them on the road to the site where the various humanoid tribes in the region meet every full moon to conduct some sort of ritual.

So, we opened with them talking about what to do about the ambassador and his latest attack. Taking their story to the authorities narrowly won out over storming the embassy and burning it to the ground.

They really hate the ambassador, it seems.

Not wanting to draw this out interminably, I decided that the ambassador was making enemies in other places, too, as he was a snobbish, arrogant, incompetent aristocrat, which doesn’t go over too well among the rough-and-ready frontier folk of Storm Point. The Captain of the Guard listened to the party’s complaint, told them that the man was on thin ice already with the mayor and council, and that the fact that he used fire magic in his latest attack in the largely wooden town should push things over the tipping point. He took the fragments of the magical device that had summoned the hellhounds and fire bats to the Wizard**, who charged the town a lot of money and then performed the necessary rituals to confirm that the device had indeed been used by the ambassador.

And so the ambassador was declared persona non grata and given 24 hours to leave town. He couldn’t take embassy personnel, and his private guards had been contracted only for local duty, so he was forced to take passage with a caravan heading back in the right direction. Our heroes watched him get the news, and scurry around trying to find a more luxurious way to travel, with big smug smiles on their faces.

They even wanted to hire on as caravan guards with the caravan the ambassador had joined, just to mess with him all the way home.

They really hate the ambassador.

I dissuaded them from doing that, basically by saying, “You want to what? What happened to wanting to find out about the shadar-kai? It’s not like I’ve got anything prepped for a caravan guard adventure!” They relented, rather than make me sulk.

Because when I sulk, I kill PCs.

So, instead of haring off after the ambassador, they went and had tea with his clerk, whom they quite liked. Said clerk delivered to them the information about an eladrin ruin in the Trembling Wood where various tribes of orcs and goblins met every new moon to do something that probably didn’t bode well for Storm Point.

They latched onto this adventure thread, and headed off into the wilds. As it got near evening, they were attacked by a goblin patrol that actually managed to put a bit of a scare into them when the inimitable Thrun the Anvil wound up dazed and prone, surrouned by a bugbear, a hobgoblin commander, and a dire wolf.

Yeah, it was a random encounter, essentially. I did up four or five encounters for along the road, and roll each half-day to see if they run into one. So, sort of mid-way between a set encounter and a random encounter. The encounter itself is set and statted, but the occurrence was random. It’s not a new idea, but I’ve been avoiding random occurrences in the 4E games because it makes it harder to see how many encounters occur before the characters level. For this game, I’m leaning away from that, designing it in the way I used to do, and trusting in the ease of customizing the encounters to level them up if necessary. Also, I’ve divided the level’s treasure into parcels and hand it out as seems appropriate at the time, rather than actually assigning it to an encounter in advance. That way, I can keep things a little more fluid and adaptive.

Anyway, that was Sunday’s game. The next game should see them to the adventure site, and then we’ll see what kinds of answers they get to their shadar-kai questions.

*”Hey, look! Milo somehow made it past the gauntlet of traps and the orc tribe to join us on our adventure!”

**I was stuck for a name, so I decided that this is the only name he uses, in order to protect his true name from enemies and rivals.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Some pretty big changes in the Post Tenebras Lux game. I’ve held off on writing about them until things sorted themselves out.

First off, two players decided, for various reasons, to leave the game. We’ll miss them, but thanks for playing with us as long as you did, Michael and Dillip.

This left us with only four players, and one who was waffling about whether he wanted to continue. Four was the bare minimum I wanted to run with, and it would have made for less redundancy in players to support our absentee player policy*.  It was also somewhat discouraging for me, as I was trying to break free of the dungeon-crawl, combat-oriented aesthetic of the Scales of War adventure path that had soured on us, but hadn’t had much of a chance to do so, yet.

So, it looked for a while like the game would fold. Then I suggested we try and recruit some replacement players.

Way back when this started, I had started the game with eight players. Two dropped because of group size. I asked them if they were interested in rejoining the game, and they said yes. So, in a flurry of activity, we whipped up two new, 3rd-level characters, complete with backstories, and worked them into the game.

This solution was enough to pull the player who was thinking about leaving back into the game, though he decided that he wouldn’t continue with his current character, but play the cleric of one of the departing players, instead**. So now the group is:

  • Torrin, dragonborn paladin of Pelor
  • Akmenos, tiefling rogue
  • Sergheia Jackalope, half-elf ranger
  • Arcos Strand, human cleric of Erathis
  • Ruingast, eladrin avenger of the Raven Queen and multiclass shaman
  • Kara, half-elf dragon sorcerer

One defender, one leader, four strikers. Kara and Ruingast can, in a pinch, pull double-duty as defenders pretty well, and Kara has some good strong controller options, so the balance is not as skewed as it might look on paper. Still, their focus is on pumping out the damage, as opposed to sucking it up or mitigating it.

All that done, I worked up a little scene where the two characters depart and the other two join. I also noticed, while helping the new players create their characters, that the four characters who had been playing all along were rather woefully short in the treasure department compared to the new arrivals, so I worked in a distribution of magic items as gifts from a group of patrons to help bring things up to par.

Now I was ready for the actual adventure to start.

After wandering out into the Witchwood looking for the mysterious barrow that appears only under the full moon and getting spanked by an owlbear, some fey panthers, gnomes, and a pseudodragon, the party limped back to Witchcross trying to figure out how the townsfolk managed to gather firewood without an armed guard. Back in the inn, we ran the scene where the two characters leave and the other two join, and the Santa Clause scene where the four original characters got their goodies.

And that’s when they met Adrianna the Young, who was not pleased that they had run out into the wood and started slaughtering everyone they found***.  After a rocky start, they got her calmed down, apologized, and persuaded her to give them her blessing to seek out the barrow, which she called the Winter Castle, to make sure it hadn’t fallen to corruption and evil, the way Rivenroar Castle had****. She even gave them what little information she had about the site: that it was warded by a magical maze of cold.

Next morning, the party bought some potions of resist cold and some heavy clothing, then headed out into the wood. Careful progress led them to Rest-by-Water, where they waited for the moon to rise in order to make finding the Winter Castle easier. The peaceful forest spirits of the place made them welcome, and made resting their quite beneficial*****. As they were leaving, they spotted a unicorn running off through the trees away from the path to their objective, and decided to follow it, in case it was leading them somewhere important.

It wasn’t but it did lead them somewhere interesting: the Stone Door. They spent a little more time examining the site and learning how it worked, then got back on the trail. The sun was setting by that time, and it was full dark when they were jumped by the single combat we had in the session.

They spotted the stirges in time to avoid a surprise round, but didn’t see the vine horror hiding in the underbrush******. I rolled crazy high for the monsters’ initiative (27 for the vine horror, 26 for the stirges), so the fight pretty much started with a surprise round, anyway. When the first character came up in the rotation, all but one of them were restrained and taking ongoing 10 damage, and about half of them had a blood-draining stirge attached to them, doing another ongoing 5. Still, they pulled through, though the cleric dropped at one point. Stacked ongoing damage is nasty.

So, that’s where we left it. Everyone seems to have enjoyed themselves – including me – and I think we’re all feeling much more positive about Post Tenebras Lux continuing.

Yay!

*Basically, I run if more than half the players are going to be there, and missing players have their characters played by one of the present players. Wtih six players, we can run with as few as many as two players not making it to the game. Fewer players means fewer people can miss the game and the game still take place.

**He and the other departing character had worked up a pretty in-depth backstory for their two characters, and one leaving and one staying didn’t make much sense within the group dynamic that had developed. Also, he didn’t want the group to lose the healing capabilities of the cleric.

***Her view of the situation, not what actually happened.

****A mix of skill challenge and roleplaying. I awarded success and failures based both on rolls, when I felt they were called for, and on specific things said and done by the characters.

*****Resting there for more than an hour granted them each an extra action point. Originally, I had planned to make resting there replenish a number of healing surges, but they were all unwounded, so I decided on the action point instead.

******Seven stirges and a vine horror, 900 xp, a level 3 encounter for 6 characters.