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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.

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.

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.

Roles, Optimization, and Building Characters in 4E

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, here’s the thing.

Back when 4E first came out, one of my friends and I had a conversation about the builds they present for each character class. He was talking about optimal builds for individual classes, and I was talking about options for creating the kind of character you want to play.

We had a bit of a disconnect over the issue, because we were coming from two different sets of assumptions, and weren’t really talking about the same things at all when we talked about building characters. He was coming from a World of Warcraft mindset, where there is* a right way and a wrong way to build a character that works in the system. I was coming at it from a tabletop game mindset, where there isn’t a right way and a wrong way to build a character as long as it fits with your concept.

One of the words my buddy would throw around was “optimized” and it’s various forms.

“I’m trying to optimize my fighter,” he would say.

“Optimize for what?” I’d ask.

He’d blink at me, and say, “Optimize him for being a fighter.”

I’d blink at him, and say, “He’s already a fighter.”

And round we’d go.

What he eventually bludgeoned into my skull was that, when he said “optimize,” he meant “choose the correct build elements to be the best at what the role entails.”

Which led me to ask, “Well, what do you want him to do?”

“I want him to be a good defender.”

And we were off again.

These sorts of discussions have led me to do a lot of thinking about the way you build characters in 4E, and what things the game seems to encourage.

Roles

I was very leery about the idea of roles in 4E. When people started talking about them online, I got nervous that they were going to be very restrictive, very rigid, and very limiting. The idea that each class would be slotted into one of only four party roles sounded way too much like a video game, where the limitations of the medium lead to a narrowly-defined play experience.

I like my pen-and-paper RPGs to be open, and rollicking, and full of choice. I like the rules to open up possibilities, not shut them down. I want the character concept of the player, and not the design limitations of the rules, to shape the build of the character. I didn’t want a bunch of cookie-cutter classes, where this class does exactly what that class does, but wears a different coloured hat.

So I was looking long and hard at the implementation of the roles in the PHB when it came out. And it turns out I didn’t find them limiting at all.

The thing that I discovered about the roles in play is that they are a useful starting point for your character. Each character tends to spread out from the primary role into at least one secondary role as they develop, which really increases the variety in characters of the same class. The PHB2 acknowledges this head on in the class write-ups, talking about which secondary roles the individual classes will fulfill the easiest.

For example, in my Storm Point game, I’ve got a fighter, a rogue, a cleric, a warlord, a ranger, and a swordmage. That’s two defenders, two leaders, and two strikers. But the fighter has concentrated on powers that let him move his opponents around the battlefield, giving him a strong secondary role as controller. The other defender, the swordmage, concentrates on movement and damage, giving him aspects of the striker. The cleric is doing his best to double as a striker, and the warlord, ranger, and rogue make good secondary defenders.

Now, the fighter is still best at his defender role – he gets up close and personal with the biggest, baddest enemy and whups it back and forth all over the battlefield, keeping it tied up and focused on him. He doesn’t do a lot of damage, and he doesn’t handle large numbers of enemies as well as a wizard would, but he’s got that monkey wrench ability that controllers have. The rogue easily dishes out more damage, but he tends to fall down a lot more if he gets caught in melee.

That’s just within one group of six players. The flexibility of the roles, and the way characters can be built to fulfill a secondary role** makes for a great deal of player choice and variety. And that’s not even getting into multiclassing.

So, like I said, the roles are a starting point, a place to begin with character creation, and it’s useful to understand what each one does. One of my worries, way back before the game was released, was that, with roles, I wouldn’t be able to play the swashbuckling fighter who relied on his agility and his rapier. And really, you can’t, using the fighter class. But if I look at the roles, I see that this concept fits the idea of the striker better than the defender, so I build the same character using the rogue class.

It’s a new way of thinking about it for me, but I’ve come to really like the idea of the roles. And the juxtaposition of role with power source gives a great way to differentiate between different classes that fulfill the same roll. The fighter and the swordmage are both defenders, but they play very differently. They feel very different. Even two arcane strikers, the warlock and the sorcerer, have a very different flavour.

And that’s all to the good.

Builds

Each character class offers a couple of builds for that class, listing feats, powers, class features, etc. that reinforce the idea of the build. I think that, as examples, they are very good for giving people ideas of what can be done with the different classes, and getting people to think about some of the synergies and combinations among the feats, powers, and features.

I don’t think they were presented very well, though.

In the class write-ups, the builds are presented in such a way as to make them seem like the only possibilities for that character class. You have to look in a section headed Creating a Character on page 52 of the PHB to actually see them explain that the builds are only suggestions, that they’re not meant to be a constraint, and that you don’t have to choose one.

With the experienced players in my Storm Point game, this wasn’t an issue. They tend to ignore anything that says they can’t create the kind of character they want, so the builds were viewed as suggestions or starting points only. Which is what they are.

In my other game, which started off as Scales of War, I had a number of newer players. If I hadn’t been careful to explain that they didn’t have to follow the build recommendations, they would have, and may have felt limited by it.

Just looking at powers alone, if a class has 4 At-Will, 4 Encounter, and 4 Daily powers available at first level, that’s 96 possible combinations at first level. Ninety-six. Not two. And then you have to factor in class features, feats, race, skills, weapon choice…

Don’t get me wrong. I think including the builds was a good idea to help people get started with the new rules. But I think that they would have been better handled if they were done like the examples of adventurers from the various races – illustrations of the kinds of things you can do as a fighter, cleric, wizard, whatever.

Which brings us to…

Optimization

How do you optimize a character?

Well, what do you want your character to do?

There are a number of optimization threads on the official Wizards of the Coast message boards. These talk in detail about how to build the “best” fighter, or cleric, or what have you. They focus primarily on powers and feats that reinforce each other in order to provide synergies and compiled benefits.

What I like about these threads is that they have a multitude of different ideas for a given class. They have acknowledged and embraced the idea that there is no one right way to build a fighter; it all depends on what you want the fighter to do.

What I don’t like about these threads is not a problem with the threads, but a problem with the basics of the game design and the assumptions behind it. I’m going off on a little tangent here, so bear with me.

The majority of rules pertaining to characters are combat-oriented. Most of the 4E rules revolve around combat. The default assumption of the game is combat. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the focus is, sometimes, a little too narrow.

At this point, the primary non-combat resources your character has are skills, which are chosen once and then just level up with you, and rituals, which get a little more involved but are restricted to those with the Ritual Caster feat. Powers and most feats are focused entirely on combat, and the majority of magic items are, as well.

This means that most of the optimization threads are based on optimizing your character to do something well in combat. There isn’t a lot you can do to focus and specialize your character in non-combat abilities.

And that, I think, is a limitation. Sure, the primary activity in the default D&D game is combat against monsters. And sure, you want your character to be able to hold his or her own in a fight, and pull out some cool tricks. And 4E does the cool tricks so very well.

But I miss the ability to build a character with a focus elsewhere.

This is my idea of optimization – being able to craft the abilities of the character to fit with the concept you have for the character.

Now, I know you don’t need a lot of rules for the roleplaying bits of the game, and the skill challenge rules add some structure (and a consummate reward) to non-combat situations, but there just aren’t a lot of choices for characters to make among the feats, powers, and class features that apply outside of combat. At least, not compared to the combat choices.

Anyway. That’s the problem I have with the optimization threads.

Having said that, I think that optimization really starts with having a clear concept of what you want your character to be. A strong concept that you keep in mind can inform each of your choices, whether for power or feat or whatever, and help make the character more of what you want. The ideal character for you may not be the one that does the most damage, or has the best AC, or the most fire spells. It may be the one with the broadest range of different kinds of abilities, or with the strange weapon choice, or the most spoken languages.

Optimization means making the character fit what you want it to be, sometimes in spite of lack of support from the rules.

So, What’s Your Point?

My point is that, despite the fact that I really like 4E, on the surface it can lean a bit too much towards a combat system/MMORPG feel than I generally prefer in a game system. I find it’s important for me to keep in mind that the game is not what’s in the rulebooks: the game is what happens at the table. Rulebooks can have a huge influence on that, but the responsibility for what the game is ultimately lies with those of us who play it.

I find that I can do all the things I like to do in 4E. If some of it isn’t as supported by the rules as I might like, well, there are plenty of other things that make me happy about it. And plenty of other games to play for a change of pace.

When it comes to making characters, the rules should help you bring the concept in your mind to life. Every ruleset has some sorts of restrictions that can prevent you from perfectly fulfilling your ideal, and 4E is no different in that respect. It offers a wide range of choices and customizability in the area of the game that gets the most development in the rules***, and doesn’t completely ignore the areas that were not the developers’ focus.

But your character is your responsibility. Your fun is your responsibility. Come up with a character you want to play, and then find the rules that let you do it. Take all the advice you can get, but ignore anyone who says you aren’t doing it right.

Have fun playing, or you’re doing it wrong.

 

 

*As I understand it, anyway. I don’t play WoW. I have nothing against it, but I have enough trouble trying to fit all my other hobbies into my life.

**Maybe even a tertiary one? I dunno. I’m going to be watching for it as the game goes on.

***I.E. Combat. This makes sense, as it is a central aspect of the game, and one of the more slippery elements that benefits from extensive, detailed rules. 4E does a good job of building rules that help cover a variety of situations and encourage cinematic, exciting fantasy combat.

Player’s Handbook 2 – Nice Work, Folks.

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Well, I’ve had the PHB 2 for a couple of weeks, now, and ran the World Wide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day adventure with the new material over at Imagine Games. About time I spouted off on my opinions.

In general, I want to say that I was really impressed with the overall quality and ideas presented in the book. I love it. Some bits more than others, but that’s the way with every sourcebook, right? I’m going to walk through the book section by section, but I want to talk about some of the overall things I noticed in the book.

  • One of my main complaints about 4E at the time it was released was that there weren’t enough options for my taste. Specifically, I bemoaned the fact that there was only one class that filled the Controller role. Well, now we have three, and I’m very happy about that.
  • The ways the various roles are filled by the different classes show a nice variety in approach and jazz. Even when the same power source powers the same role, such as the Warlock and the Sorcerer both being Arcane Strikers, the difference in powers and outlook really makes the two classes different in feel and play. This is a good thing.
  • A great many of the new classes work in interesting and surprising ways, giving me a lot of ideas for different characters I’d like to play. This is what I want out of a character book.
  • Nothing in the book is necessary to play 4E. You don’t need this book. But it’s a bunch of good stuff that builds on what has come before. It is a true expansion, giving new options and choices, but not required for play.

Now, on to the specifics. I’m gonna go chapter by chapter.

Introduction: The Primal Power Source

I was a little leery of how they were going to fit Primal power into the whole range of power sources, and what they could do with it outside of Druids and Barbarians. I was especially wary of how it would fit into the story elements of the gods vs. primordials background myth. Well, they made it work, and I like it. It makes for an interesting difference between Clerics and Druids, and gives a basis for an “Old Religion” style paganism in the midst of the polytheistic basic D&D religion set-up. Very flavourful, adding interesting choices, without adding too many built-in difficulties, such as rivalries between Druids and Clerics, or between the primal spirits and the gods.

Chapter One: Character Races

New races never really thrill me. Most races seem pretty bland, and there always seems to be overlap in the design goal of various races. I mean, we still get three different types of elf in the core rules (elf, eladrin, half-elf), and one almost-an-elf (halfling). Given that, I’m not very taken by the addition of the gnome, though I know there are people out there who love the little guys. The half-orc is fine for nostalgia’s sake, but I didn’t really feel the loss when it didn’t show up in the core rules. And I never cared much one way or the other about goliaths in 3E, and still don’t care much about them in 4E.

The shifter I cared about, because I’m an Eberron fan, and I really liked the way they worked in that world. I found their roles interesting and their culture rife with gaming hooks. Also, they did cool stuff when they shifted. I’m not as impressed by the new mechanics of the shifting – it requires the shifter to be bloodied, and doesn’t seem as flavourful as in 3E. The Razorclaw Shifting power doesn’t seem to make your claws very razorlike, for example. And the racial feats don’t do a whole lot to add to the flavour. It’s not that the shifters are a bad race, now; they just don’t have the same flavour that I used to like.

This is balanced by the devas. I really like the idea behind the race, which seems to be inspired by the aasimar and the kalashtar of 3E. They have an interesting background, a fun little racial ability to draw on their past incarnations, and a cool look to them. Score.

The Racial Paragon Paths are another thing that I think was really needed in the game. The requirement to either take a paragon path or take paragon multiclassing at 11th level is something that I’m still not sure I like, but adding the racial paths is certainly a step in the right direction. My only regret is that there aren’t more of them, because I’m greedy for choices, but I expect we’ll see some show up in Dragon.

Chapter Two: Character Classes

This is, of course, the meat of the book. Eight new character classes: four Primal, two Divine, two Arcane. This brings us to a nice range of four of each power source in the PHB and the PHB2, not counting the Swordmage from Forgotten Realms or the Artificer playtest. It’s a nice field of choices.

One thing that struck me was the way this book acknowledges that the four roles are not restrictive. Each class has a primary role, but can focus on different secondary roles based on their choices of power. This means that, even without multiclassing, your character can reasonably fill multiple roles. Now, it won’t be as good at the secondary role as at its primary role, but the options are there. The roles are guidelines, not straitjackets.

So, the classes.

We’ve got the return of the Barbarian, the Bard, the Druid, and the Sorcerer. Nothing terribly surprising, there, though I was very impressed by the way they implemented them in 4E. The Druid’s wildshape, the Barbarian’s rages, the Bard’s musical ability, and the Sorcerer’s innate magic, all of it was handled in very interesting and playable ways. In the WWDDGD adventure, I got to see the Barbarian in action, and it was a thing of beauty.

For new classes, we’ve got the Avenger, the Invoker, the Shaman, and the Warden. In play, the Avenger and Invoker were a lot of fun, each of them fitting into their niche nicely, but complementing each other in what they could do. I love the idea of the Shaman with a spirit companion, as well. The Warden has got one of my players drooling over the ideas it puts into his head.

All in all, the classes are a win. All of them.

I only skimmed the Paragon Paths associated with the different classes, but they each look as solid and fun as any in the PHB, giving interesting focus to the base class. Same thing with the Epic Destinies – nothing stands out as amazing, but nothing stands out as terrible, either.

Chapter Three: Character Options

The background system offered in this chapter is primarily useful for new players, and for giving idea seeds to others trying to come up with their backgrounds. Granting a minor mechanical benefit to the background is a nice way to encourage folks to come up with a backstory, and the suggestions are not overpowered. A good, if not really earthshattering, addition to the game.

The feats mainly focus on the new races and classes presented in the book, as they should, though the addition of Weapon Expertise and Implement Expertise feats will be very popular with other classes, if my play groups are any example.

Not a whole lot to say about the new gear, though they have some useful charts consolidating the masterwork armour types from both the PHB and Adventurer’s Vault in a way that clears up some of the confusion about those things. New magic items are primarily for use with the new classes and races, and seem a decent assortment.

The ritual assortment is small, but has a number of good things in it. The Bard rituals are nice, and give that class a bit of the musical and language-based abilities that make the Bard feel like a Bard. The other rituals fill in some gaps that existed in the ritual list – it’s not completely filled, but it’s a nice addition, and I expect more in Arcane Power this month. The section on alternate ritual books, while short, opens up some good roleplaying possibilities for the various classes.

Appendix: Rule Updates

Very much an appendix. The section on reading a power clarifies a few things nicely, and the Stealth errata is useful, but nothing actually necessary, seeing as the errata exists in several other places. Handy, but far from essential.

 

So, that’s my take on the PHB2. A very good book that bodes well for the continuation of the game line. If they keep producing books of this quality, I will be very, very happy.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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It’s been a while since I posted anything. I blame the flu that’s still hanging on nearly two weeks later.

This past session of Storm Point, I wanted to try something a little different with the group. I wanted to give them a session where the optimal solution to their problems was not combat. Now, this can be a bit of a risk, because this group likes fighting. And bullying. And intimidation. And just generally being jerks.

But sometimes it shades a bit too close to them being an evil party, with the underlying assumption that they can do whatever they want because they’re tougher than anyone else around them*. So, I wanted to capitalize on one of their suggestions in the previous session, which was that they wanted to turn the captive eladrin who had attacked them over to the town watch and press charges of brigandry. For that to be effective, though, they would have to behave, at least for one session, less like brigands than the people they had accused.

The catch is that there still had to be interesting things for them to do, and challenges for them to overcome. I thought about setting things up as a skill challenge, but I wanted things to revolve more around their choices than around dice rolls. And yet I still wanted to give them an experience award for handling things in a non-violent manner.

So, I did what any GM worth his salt does when the rules don’t quite do what we need them to. I made stuff up.

Basically, what I did was set an experience point value for the various challenges based on the party level and the importance of the scene to the ongoing story. Then I planted a few moments in each scene where the party got to make decisions about how to react to something, how to proceed, etc. Combat was an option at pretty much every one of these moments of choice, so I built encounters based on the experience point value of the scene to spring on the characters if they chose to go for their swords. I also worked out the probable consequences of starting a fight in terms of the broader story and the situation in town.

So, for example, they got a letter from the head of the halfling clans in Rivertown, asking for a meeting to arrange a cessation of hostilities. The meet was set at a halfling tavern near the waterfront, and they were warned in advance that Granny Magda, the head of the clans, was going to have a number of guards with her, and that the party was welcome to come armed, as well. The discussion determined that the heroes had no plans to continue their vendetta against the halflings now that Jemmy Fish and his goblin connection were out of business, and that they had no interest in involving themselves in any of the “untaxed businesses” that the clans ran. They parted on relatively good terms, and earned a nice experience reward. There were a couple of moments where they could have reacted badly and started a fight with Granny and her boys, but they managed to control their tempers and not be complete dinks, so I didn’t have to trot out the stats for the fight, along with all the little surprises that were hidden under the floor of the tavern.

Using set-ups like that, we ran through settling the halfling feud, the trial and escape of the eladrin, and some arms-length dealing with the ambassador of the Empire Reborn, all without combat. But the ambassador is an even bigger jerk than the party**, and decided to make one last attempt to take them out using some summoned firebats and hellhounds. After the first round of the fight, I was worried that I had made things too tough*** – the auras of the hellhounds and the fiery swoop ability of the firebats dropped the dragonborn rogue on the first round, and bloodied both the sword mage and the fighter. But the group pulled things together, and won, though it was a tougher fight than I had anticipated, thanks to the stacking of the auras and the ongoing fire damage from the bats.

N0w they’ve got a real mad on for the ambassador, but don’t know what to do about it, because he’s got extralegal status in Storm Point, and has also hired a few local dragonborn mercenaries for personal protection.

I’m interested in seeing what they come up with.

*This is not actually the case, but they haven’t gone up against anyone tougher yet.

**Hard to imagine, but there it is.

***Three firebats and two hellhounds, 1200 xp, a level 5 encounter for 6 PCs. My group is level 4, but were fresh, so I expected the fight to be pretty easy for them.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Not a lot happened in yesterday’s game – it dealt with the trip from the last adventure site back to Storm Point. Still, I got to apply some real pressure to the group, and I think they’re starting to realize that they aren’t invulnerable.

After the previous session, they had decided that they wanted to follow up on the whole “shadar-kai forming an alliance with the local goblins” angle. Unfortunately, they don’t have much of a clue as to how to do that – they haven’t found any real loose ends to start pulling at. So, Erik suggests that they go and see if the ambassador from the Empire Reborn has any information.

Now, the ambassador is a bit of a throw-away NPC that’s taking on a new significance in the game. He entered the game world by way of a little cut scene* I wrote, and then got used in a piece of player fiction**, which sort of established his character and role – a rather incompetent coward who is trying to use the adventurers to advance the plans of the Empire Reborn. He’s not good at it, but his clerk seems to be…

Anyway, after dropping a hint that they thought the Empire Reborn was in league with the shadar-kai, the heroes are hoping that the Empire Reborn will have done some digging into the situation, the results of which they can now intimidate out of the ambassador.

A plan so cunning it deserves its own Blackadder quote.

Despite their planning, they didn’t get to try anything. Still battered and worn down by cleaning out the goblin lair, they decided to make the three-hour journey back to Storm Point so they could sleep in beds. And, of course, predictable bastard that I am, I attacked them.

I used two griffons and two eladrin fey knights****, with the idea of one or two round attacks, in a hit-and-run pattern, harrying the heroes back to town.

First of all, the charging griffons and their riders hit like a ton of bricks. Man. Massive damage on the first round. And then they fight for a couple of rounds, and take off again. Good plan.

And, of course, the party decided they didn’t like the idea of running back to town, fighting off the griffon attacks as they ran low of healing surges. And Thrun, the dwarven fighter who is the primary defender, was right out of healing surges. Given that, they decided to find a place to hole up for a long rest before continuing back to town. Some pretty amazing Nature, Perception, and Stealth rolls got them a cave with a spring in it, under an overhang, with the cave mouth screened by bushes.

They set watches and took a long rest. During that time, the fey knights managed to find where their prey had gone to ground, and set up in ambush just outside.

This fight went a little more in favour of the party, mainly because they were at full strength, with all their dailies and healing surges. And they used most of them. Four 7th level creatures are a tough fight for six 3rd level characters. Still, in the end, they managed to put the griffons down and render the eladrin unconscious. A couple of judicious History rolls have turned up a tie to the Empire Reborn – the fallen Empire of Nerath used to have a unit of griffon-mounted eladrin air cavalry, called the 2nd Imperial Airborne, also known as The Immortals.

With their captives and the new information, they think they have enough to bring the law to bear on the ambassador. So, they’ve returned to town, turned the eladrin over to the local Watch, and went to get a good meal and some rest.

I’ve got some interesting ideas about where things go next.

*From time to time, about once an adventure, I post to our game forum a short piece of fiction that I call a cut scene. This is usually from the point of view of outsiders, commenting on what the adventurers are doing, and how it relates to them. It’s a way of providing a little more context and throughline for the game narrative.

**This bit of fiction was a sort of response to my cut scene and the events in the game. In it, the party confronted the (rather cowardly and incompetent) ambassador in his office, and threatened him*** for his part in the squad of Empire Reborn armsmen that tried to steal the goblin map from them. They also mentioned the shadar-kai, implying that they thought the ambassador was involved in that, too.

***Y’know, these heroes are kinda dicks.

****1200 xp, a level 5 encounter for 6 characters.