Tag Archives: 4E

“It’s Not D&D” – 4th Edition Analysis and Apologia

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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First off, let me start by saying a couple of things.

  1. I love 4th Edition D&D.
  2. I love 3rd Edition D&D, including 3.5.

There. Now you know where I’m starting from.

I’ve seen some comments on forums and such about how 4th Edition D&D is not D&D. People point to a number of things to justify this claim, from the loss of Vancian “fire-and-forget” magic to the fact that houscats can no longer kill 1st-level wizards with one swipe of the claws. Most of the people posting these… let’s call them discussions, because the word “diatribe” is needlessly inflammatory… feel very deeply and strongly about the points their making.

They make these points with varying degrees of skill and lucidity, like any internet discussion. Some are well-reasoned analyses of differences, some are foam-specked and profanity-laden rants. Both types often bring up interesting thoughts and opinions.

I’m going to wade in here, because I just read a blog post from one of my players here*, where he talks about why he feels that 4E is not D&D. I think it’s an insightful post, that makes some good claims, so I’m gonna talk about it.

Let’s get this out of the way: 4E is D&D, because Wizards of the Coast, who own the trademark and the intellectual property, say it’s D&D. Any other interpretation is just the wonking of self-perceived-purists of the so-called fanboy elite**.

Having made that somewhat-antagonist statement, I will say that 4E is definitely not the same game that 3E*** was. I would even go so far as to say that 4E is a much bigger departure from 3E than 3E was from 2E, or 2E was from 1E.

Now, to be fair, there was the same kind of outcry back at the launch of 3E, which broke a lot of the unwritten rules of D&D design. Maximum hit points at 1st level, free multiclassing, unified experience point progression for all classes, no racial class or level limitations… all that good stuff. Remember? And then there was the new stuff grafted on, things like feats and skills and prestige classes and funky double weapons. D&D finally owned up to the fact that it was simulating nothing but D&D – a very specific kind of medieval fantasy.

People came around. D&D became a driving force in the market again. Hell, 3E made me start buying D&D stuff again, and even made me run a game.

I think that the success of 3E, despite its real departure from the sacred cows of D&D tradition, showed that people would accept big changes, as long as the changes made for a fun game. And 3E was, and still is, a fun game. Currently, I’m playing in three different 3E games, so you know I love it.

The changes from 3E to 4E were even bigger. About the only things that stayed the same were the names of things and the basic die mechanic. Everything else got a big overhaul – so big that, without the names, you wouldn’t know it was the same game.

Here’s some of the claims made by those criticizing the game, and my response to them:

  • It’s not as gritty. Generally, I take this to mean that your character is not as weak and powerless at lower levels. I would totally agree with that. I just don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Sure, there is an appeal to emulating the sword-and-sorcery books of Leiber and Howard, but D&D hasn’t really done a good job of doing that ever. Firstly, because it’s been predicated on parties of adventurers, and secondly because the hit point mechanic doesn’t do that good a job of modeling realistic combat. However, it is very true that the lower levels are far less desperate and perilous, as long as the DM does a good job of balancing the encounters. Do I miss that sort of thing? Sometimes. On the other hand, it’s fun to have a character who can actually do cool stuff starting right at first level, and doesn’t need to sleep for eight hours after an eighteen-second fight.
  • Too many hit points. This is sort of tied to the above point, but not exclusively. This is one of the main things that makes the combats last longer, at least in number of rounds. Because it’s not just the PCs with more hit points, it’s the monsters, too, while damage output (at least, at lower levels) hasn’t scaled up by the same degree. This means that each fight generally goes on for more rounds than in 3E. The upside is that it makes it more likely that the monsters will get to trot out their special tricks. From the players’ point of view, that may also be the downside. I like the fact that monsters get to do more things, and to be more interesting. It also gives more time for the PCs to do things other than just stand and hit things.
  • Combat is very repetitive. I’ve heard from people that combat in 4E is just your character using the same power or two over and over again until the bad guys fall down. I really don’t get this one. After all, combat in 3E was just using the same attack or two over and over again until the bad guys fall down. Personally, I think the powers add more variety, even at low levels when you have fewer of them. Also, I think the way actions have been structured gives players more incentive to try different things in combat, because you don’t lose your iterative attacks if you move. Still, I’ve read this one on the net, and I’ve had a couple of players mention it to me in person, so they obviously feel that way. I just don’t see why, myself.
  • I hate having to pick a paragon path. Yeah. This one, I’ll go along with whole-heartedly. Paragon paths obviously replace prestige classes from 3E. The one thing that was overlooked, though, was that prestige classes were optional. Paragon paths really aren’t unless you’ve gone full-bore into multiclassing. Now, part of the feeling of constraint may be because we’re still pretty early in the development of the game, so there aren’t as many paragon paths to choose from as we might like. Still, I think it would be better if there was an option for a “purist” paragon path for each class, if you see what I mean.
  • It feels too much like a video game. I’m gonna be blunt, here: if it feels too much like a video game, that’s the fault of the people at the table, not the game. I honestly feel that you can’t blame the system for this one. Now, I’ll admit that they borrowed some ideas from things like World of Warcraft, but they also borrowed from other board, card, and roleplaying games. Some of the things they’ve borrowed work better than others, in my opinion. For example, the exceptions-based approach to powers and abilities (borrowed from Magic: The Gathering, among other games) works very well, letting monster stat blocks stay small and useful, and minimizing the amount people have to shuffle through various books. On the other hand, the marking mechanic (borrowed from the MMORPG idea of aggro) requires a lot more fiddling around in play than I think the advantages warrant. Interesting idea there, but not perfect implementation.
  • It’s just a combat system. That’s just crap. Like most mainstream RPGs, 4E devotes a fair bit of space to combat, because a) that’s where the market is, and b) that’s what requires the most simulationist rules. But 4E, for the first time, starts putting rules around non-combat encounters, as well. The skill challenge rules may not be perfect, but they’re definitely a non-combat set of rules that takes up several pages in the DMG. Now, there’s definitely a real weighting of the powers for characters towards the damage-dealing, combat powers, I will admit. More of a weighting than I might like to see, even among the so-called Utility Powers. But still, it comes down to what you do with the game at the table. If all you run is combat, then the game is gonna look like a combat system. If you mix it up a little more, then it won’t. And to say that there is no support for other types of play just says to me that you haven’t looked at the DMG at all.

In interest of full disclosure, this next list is some of the claims on the pro side of the argument, and what I think about them:

  • Combat is faster. Hmmm. So far, I’m not seeing it. I think each round goes faster, but you wind up with a larger number of rounds per combat, so on the whole, I think it’s a wash. If anything, I find that 4E combat is going slower because neither I nor my players have the mastery of the system that we developed in 3E. That, of course, will be corrected with practice. But I don’t see combat speeding up all that much.
  • Prep is faster for the DM. Yes and no. Customizing something that’s already been done, like updating a published adventure to match the number of characters in your party, is amazingly quick and easy. I love that. Having said that, building an adventure from scratch takes about the same amount of time, I find, though again part of that is lack of mastery of the rules. One thing that sort of complicates things is the linking of treasure to level, rather than to encounters. It pushes a DM to a very linear plot, I find, to make sure that the treasure is appropriate for the characters’ level. Still, that’s not insurmountable – it just takes some juggling, which takes some extra time.
  • Monsters are easier to run. This one I agree with whole-heartedly. I’ll even go a little farther, and say that monsters are also far more interesting to run. Even the lowliest kobold and goblin has a little trick designed to make them memorable to the characters. Fighting a goblin is now substantially different from fighting a kobold. And that’s a really good thing.
  • Running the game in general is easier for the GM. I don’t know. It’s tough to compare, because of that lack of rules mastery in the new system, compared to the acquired rules mastery in the old system. Still, the underlying structure, the new ways defenses are used, and the idea of exception-based abilities all seem to point in that direction. I hope it’s the case. But it’s too soon to tell.
  • Characters get to make interesting choices at each level. Yeah, I think so. There don’t seem to be anymore dead levels for any character. At each level, you get a new power, or feat, or something nice. Having said that, there seems to be optimal builds for each class, which I’m not sure I like. Optimal builds implies sub-optimal builds, which is a sort of tacit constraint on character development. I’m hoping that phenomenon is just a result of the comparatively small number of choices available because the game’s less than a year into it’s published support.

So, there’s my take on the whole thing. I like both systems, probably because they each do different things. In the end, I really find that the group makes the game, not the other way around. As my friend Penny said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that rules systems aren’t that important to the game. They’re just the tools you use to tell the stories you want.”****

This begs the final question: why am I currently running 4E games, and no 3E games? Simple. I’ve done the 3E experience. I ran an eight-year campaign. I’ll gladly play 3E, but I’m not interested in running it anymore. I’ve told my 3E story. Now I want to tell 4E stories.

But I love playing 3E, as Ladimir, Synry, and Dunael will attest.

 

 

 

*It was written back at the beginning of November, but I just read it now. Yeah, I don’t check that blog very often.

**So take that, Michael! 😉

***Take it as read that, whenever I refer to 3E, I’m including 3.5.

****I’m paraphrasing, despite the quotes. She said something that amounted to the same thing. Forgive the misquotation, Penny.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Ran the latest session of Storm Point last night. It went quite well, but prompted a bit of a change of focus for the group.

Up until the game last night, they were planning on riding one of the floating islands in Lake Thunder through the perpetual thunderstorm in the centre of the lake to see what was inside the swirling clouds and lightning. However, when they got back to town after their explorations of the Arkhosian ruins, they found that Jemmy Fish, the halfling gangster they had embarrassed way back in the first session, had gone out of his way to mess with each of their lives in some fashion.

This, they decided, would not do.

So, they got together to discuss what to do about it, and were ambushed by a gang of halflings. They defeated them all, knocking most of them unconscious*, though a lucky critical by Ssudai** caused one to fall to his death. As they were tying up their prisoners, they noticed another halfling run off from a hiding spot, and gave chase.

What followed was a very successful skill challenge, if I do say so myself. Ssudai was using Acrobatics to run, leap, and swing across the rooftops and Stealth to sneak up on her; Soren was using History to remember shortcuts through town; Faran used his Perception to keep track of the target and his Diplomacy to convince her to stop; Milo and Thrun just poured on the juice with Athletics to catch up and Intimidate to slow her down; and Galvanys used a number of skills plus his Fey Step power to close distance. It all ended with a well-placed, leaping Thrun landing on their quarry on a barge in the halfling quarter of town.

What made the challenge work, in my opinion, was that everyone not only picked different skills to try, but also narrated what it looked like in game. It changed it from a simple exercise in rolling dice into an interesting, gripping chase scene. People got into it, and kept scouting their character sheet for different skills they might try. This is, I believe, the real strength of skill challenges. When everyone gets into them and lets themselves go with it, it turns into a very entertaining part of the game.

Anyway, rather than interrogate her in the midst of a crowd of increasingly hostile halflings on a halfling barge in the middle of the halfling neighbourhood while looking for a halfling gangster***, the party prudently decided to take her back to the militia’s holding cells for a little talk. Using Diplomacy and Intimidate to do a good cop/bad cop routine on their prisoner, they got the name of Jemmy’s boat, the fact that he was holed up there with about a half-dozen of his men, and that he had hired some extra muscle from the goblins.

So, they stormed the boat. Turns out the goblins Jemmy hired were a couple of bugbears. They gave our boys some tight moments****, what with their ability to dish out huge helpings of damage, along with knocking folks prone and dazing them. Really, the fight on the boat was everything I could have hoped for, with a couple folks (on both sides) going into the drink, and Jemmy taking to the rigging and sniping at the party, and others following him up. It was a blast, and showed off the cinematic quality of 4E combat*****.

Now, with the missing goods recovered, and Jemmy out of the way, our heroes are talking about postponing their little trip on the floating island in favour of trying to figure out what’s going on with the halfling-goblin alliance that Jemmy seems to have been building. I’ve got them discussing it over on our message board, so that I have some idea of what sort of adventure to build around their intentions.

And this is why I’m glad I’m not running an Adventure Path campaign with Storm Point. The party can explore whatever interests them in the setting, instead of following a breadcrumb trail from one dungeon to another. Depending on how they decide to proceed, we may wind up with an urban investigation and gang war, or a wilderness hunt for goblins, or some combination of the two.

I’m looking forward to it, whatever it is.

*And we all liked how easy this was in 4E. When you reduce someone to 0 hit points, you get to decide if they’re dead or just knocked out. No more fussing with nonlethal damage and stuff. Some things, though, I’ve ruled can’t be turned into a knockout: crossbows, arrows, secondary effects of spells, stuff like that.

**And when I say lucky, I mean lucky! He rolled a natural 20 to hit, and I invoked the halfling’s reroll power. He pouted at me, but rolled again. Another natural 20! Right there, in front of God and everyone! So, that was the Trick Strike power, which reduced the target to 1 hit point, and slid the target right off the rooftop for a 1d10 fall. Dead.

***I don’t know what it is, but pretty much everyone I game with just hates halflings, so I find they make a good underclass, outsider society in most of my games. It lets me riff on prejudice and ostracism.

****And I find my self consistently impressed by the way the healing system in 4E changes the resource management model. I don’t have to pull as many punches as a DM, because I know the characters have the hit points and healing surges to take it, but they still have to be careful because they may not have the time or the ability to spend a healing surge when they need to. I was worried that the prevalent healing might remove the risk from combat, but it doesn’t. It just changes it.

*****Which, I am the first to admit, may not be to everyone’s taste. There’s something to be said for the grim, gritty style of fantasy play. But I gotta say, for my money, I want the high-flying, swashbuckling, crazy-magic-wielding 4E feel.

Leaving the Path

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, I’ve been running the Scales of War adventure path for a group of players. I’ve talked about it here. I’ve decided to give up on it, though.

Why? Because I’m bored with it.

Not with the game – I like playing with these people, and it’s always a fun social event when we get together to play. And they’re having fun.

But I’m not. I find the adventures to not be very interesting.

We started play back in September, and we play every three weeks. So, we’ve had five or six sessions. And we’re still on the first adventure, still slogging room-by-room through the first dungeon. And when I look at the adventures down the line, all I see are more large site-based adventures.

Don’t get me wrong; the adventures aren’t necessarily bad or boring, but I am bored with them. It’s not the kind of play style I prefer. I like my dungeon crawling in smaller chunks, with a variety of other stuff mixed in. To be fair, we start to see a little more of that in some of the later adventures, but it’s not enough to keep my interest, especially considering that we have to get through this extended crawl first.

Add to this the fact that two of my six players are pretty much brand new to roleplaying. I don’t think the published adventures are doing that good a job of showing off the variety of things that can go on in a game, and that means the new folks are getting a little shortchanged.

There’s another reason that I haven’t mentioned to any of the others, though. Now that I’m devel0ping some familiarity and skill with the new system, I want to stretch and make my own adventures. I see large areas of the game that are so far pretty much neglected in the rules and the published adventures, and I want to see what I can do with them.

What am I going to do? Well, being a democratic sort, I laid out four options and I’m letting people vote.

  1. Scrap the game entirely.
  2. Start a new game, with new characters.
  3. Continue with the same characters, but different adventures.
  4. Continue with different adventures, and give players the opportunity to rebuild or swap out their characters.

As I had expected, option 4 seems to be the most popular choice.

The caveat is that I want to finish this adventure first. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don’t like leaving things half-finished. I want them to get to the end of this story. Secondly, it strains verisimilitude to have their characters just walk away from the kidnapped townsfolk. It’s not very heroic.

I’m not giving up on Dungeon Magazine entirely, though; even if I’m not always happy with the adventures as wholes, there are some brilliant encounters in some of them that I plan to lift right out and use as I see fit.

So, over the next little while, as we finish off this adventure, I’ve got my players thinking about what they want out of the game. I want them thinking about whether their characters are what they want, or if they want to change them. It looks like at least one player is planning on making a change to her character, and we’re talking it out.

I’ve also asked them to send me ideas of what they want to see in the game, what sorts of adventures interest them, and what they want their characters to achieve. This will help me shape the adventures for them.

So here’s a question for you folks out there: What are your favourite moments from a fantasy roleplaying game? What made you think, “Yeah! This is what gaming should be?” I’m curious. And I want to steal your ideas.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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We’ve had two sessions since my last post about the game, and we’ve just finished the first full adventure. The party reached level 2 at the end of last night’s session.

There hasn’t been a whole lot new to report; we’re all learning the ins and outs of the new system, and seeing where it works and where we want to tweak it for our group. However, we have found out some interesting things, and we’ve been having fun.

In the session before last, I trotted out a couple of traps in the middle of a fight: a pair of spear gauntlet traps with four rat swarms. I decided that the rat swarms weren’t heavy enough to trigger the trap, but that they were valid targets when the trap went off. This allowed me to preserve the surprise of the traps while still allowing the PCs to use the traps against the rats if they could figure out how.

The fact that I used two traps in an overlapping pattern caused some consternation for the party, and it’s something I want to remember for next time. I found that they viewed the traps primarily as an obstacle to be avoided; they didn’t try to disarm the things during combat. They did work out the trigger pattern, though, and used it a couple of times to target the rats specifically.

The other encounter that session was with some zombies. Because the ruins were from the lost dragonborn empire, I described the undead as looking like rotting dragonborn, and the gravehounds as drakes instead of dogs or wolves. The battle took place in a little knot of rooms and corridors, with doors opening to surprise the party with more zombies, and the cleric wound up being cut off from the party while being savaged by a gravehound and a corruption corpse, but they pulled through. We all quite liked the zombie vulnerability to critical hits – it came up once or twice, and then everyone was hoping for a head shot. Very much in the vein of a zombie movie.

Last night, they faced off against a young black dragon. I advanced it one level to make it an appropriate level 4 enouncter for a party of 6 characters. At the start of combat, I began to be afraid that I had made things too tough; most of the party was down a few healing surges, and the dragon used darkness, stealth, and an underground river to get in a few pretty devastating attacks early on. Then the party fell back, regrouped, and did an end run around the river. They managed to trap the dragon away from the river, thanks to a plethora of readied actions and a very cautious advance, and proceeded to kick it all around the place. Thrun, the dwarven fighter, really started having fun with Tide of Iron, Footwork Lure, and Shield Bash, tossing the dragon around. Ssudai, the dragonborn rougue, came up with a neat Acrobatic stunt: grabbing the dragon’s tail on the backswing after the dragon had tail slashed another character and using it to swing around into a flanking position behind the dragon for a sneak attack. That’s the kind of thing I want the characters in my game doing, so I let him roll, and he nailed it, and unloaded with a pretty impressive helping of damage.

In the end, they took down the dragon, though Soren, the human warlord, fell during the fight. He didn’t die, though, so that’s okay.

The last encounter of the evening was with a shadar-kai witch, a chainfighter, and a couple of dark creepers. The players were feeling cocky after the dragon fight, and they’d had a chance to rest, so I didn’t pull any punches. The dark creepers got a surprise round, and the shadar-kai unloaded with everything they had. Level-wise, the fight was equivalent to the kruthik battle from a couple of sessions ago, though with fewer creatures. Still, whether it was because they were all fresh, or because they’re starting to work a lot better together, the fight was pretty easy for them. No one dropped, though Milo the swordmage came pretty close. The chainfighter even got to unload with two Dance of Deaths in the fight, though my bad dice luck minimized that advantage. The fight took a long time in real time, though, mainly becuase the dice were all tired and didn’t want to roll above a six.

So, we wrapped up a little late, but everyone was happy to level up, and seemed to have fun. I count it as a win.

Building a Demo

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Okay, if you’ve read my blog in the past couple of weeks, you probably know that I’m running a couple of D&D 4E demos at Imagine Games on November 29 and December 13. If you’re in Winnipeg and want to try out the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, come on down and play. Games start at 1:00 p.m. There’s limited seating, so show up early if you want to guarantee a spot.

Anyway, I’m working this week on putting together the demo, and figured that I’d talk about the method I use. It’s the method I’ve used in other demos in the past, and it works fairly well, so I’m not changing it this time around. Here’s how I go about building a demo.

There are four things you need to put together in order to have a solid demo:

  • Venue
  • Adventure
  • Characters
  • Play Aids

 Venue

For me, venue is the easies thing. I run my demos at Imagine Games, the local game and hobby store run by my friends, Pedro and Wendy. How do I set up the venue? I say to Pedro, “Hey. Want me to run a demo on Saturday?” Easy.

If you don’t have such a handy venue available, you may have to scramble a little. Having said that, most game stores are generally pretty open to having someone come in and run a demo – it’s free advertising for them, it generates some traffic, and it helps build the hobby. You may have to convince the manager that you’re the kind of person he or she wants to run a demo, so remember to be friendly and polite.

If you don’t have a local store available or willing to support you in this, check out the local libraries and community centres. They often have function rooms that you can use, sometimes free, sometimes for a nominal fee.

Wherever you wind up running your demo, keep in mind that, unless it’s your own personal venue, you’re a guest there. Find out what rules your host has, and make sure everyone follows them. That makes it more likely that you’ll get to come back. Remember: friendly and polite.

Adventure

Once you’ve got your space, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to run. This is going to involve a number of factors you need to consider; it’s not like putting together the adventure for your regular group. You have to keep in mind:

  • Time. How much time have you got to run? If you’ve got a whole afternoon, you can put together a much longer adventure than if you have a two-hour slot. This may be set by the venue, or it may be set by the number of participants you’re expecting.
  • Participants. How many people are you going to have at the demo? If you want to limit the number of seats, you have to make sure that people know that seating is limited. Be realistic about your ability to manage the group size, and keep in mind that more players means the adventure will take longer to run, because it will take longer to cycle through each of them. If you’ve got a large number of people interested, but a game that works best with smaller numbers, consider running multiple shorter slots instead of one longer one. Run two two-hour sessions instead of one four-hour session. You don’t need a new adventure for this; just repeat.
  • Purpose. What are you trying to accomplish with your demo? If you’re trying to attract new players, you will want to run something simple and basic. If you’re trying to showcase a new release, you’ll want to make sure you use two or three of the coolest things from that release in the adventure. If you’re trying to appeal to more accomplished gamers, you need to run something a little less straightforward. Figure out what your primary goal is, and keep it in mind.

So, I’m going to have all afternoon for my demo. It’s D&D 4E, which is tailored for 5 players out of the box, but it’s pretty easy to adjust up and down on the fly, especially if I prepare the adventure knowing I might have to do that. Turn out for some demos at Imagine has been overwhelming, and for other demos it’s been underwhelming, so I think I’m going to build two two-hour adventures that can be crammed together into a larger four-hour adventure. That gives me the flexibility to stop after two hours if there’s another group of people who want in, or if two hours is all a group wants to play, while letting me stretch out the session to four hours if I only get one group of folks who want to play all afternoon.

I’m aiming the game at people who are new to 4E, if not D&D or RPGs in general, so I want something with a basic format to it, but a couple of twists along the way. Specifically for 4E, I want to show off the way character powers work, how interesting the monsters are, and skill challenges. I’ve previously done demo adventures based around a goblin raid on a caravan; I think I’ll start with that premise and see where it leads me.

Now, you don’t have to build an adventure. Using a published one is fine, and lots of companies even provide demo adventures in their products or on their websites. In fact, I still have the Into the Shadowhaunt demo kit Wizards sent out for the launch of 4E. Why am I building an adventure? Couple of reasons. For one thing, I find it pretty easy and quick to do in 4E. For another, most of the other adventures have a little too much exposure for my taste – I want to offer something fresh to the participants, and not have someone who has, for example, read the Kobold Hall adventure in the DMG bored because that’s the adventure I’m running.

Characters

 You need pregenerated characters for a demo. The time needed to create characters with the participants as part of the demo is just too great – it’ll overshadow the actual adventure. The only time to have character generation as part of the demo is either a multi-session continuing demo (I used to do a four-session Learn Dungeons & Dragons demo, and character creation was the entire first session) or if the character creation system something important to the actual play of the game and you want to show it off (games like Spirit of the Century, Dogs in the Vineyard, and 3:16, for example).

Keep the complexity of the characters in synch with your primary audience. If this is an intro game, keep them simple. If you’re trying to show off a new feature from a supplement, make sure it’s highlighted.

My demo is aimed at people new to 4E, so I’m going to go with first-level characters, and I’m going to use options only from the core rule books. I was planning on doing up a set of characters with the DDI Character Builder beta, but there are some issues with it on Vista that are still being resolved, so instead I think I’m just going to use the characters from Keep on the Shadowfell.

Play Aids

This last bit is kind of weird. You wouldn’t think so, but having the right play aids can do more for your demo than pretty much anything else. If you choose wrong, things slow down, participants get frustrated and bored, and you can wind up with a great adventure that no one actually enjoys.

The key I’ve found to play aids is to think about them in two flavours. One is something that makes the game flow easier, and one is something that makes the game more cool. And never forget that the aids need to help you, too; not just the players.

So, for making the game flow easier, the two big things are character sheets and the adventure text. Make sure both are readable, both are easy to understand, and both have all the details they need. Do the math ahead of time when you can, so that players don’t need to figure out their bonuses every time they roll the dice, and you don’t have to fumble around with the monsters the same way. If you are going to have multiple versions of some parts of the adventure, like adjusting encounters for different numbers of players, do the work ahead of time so it doesn’t bog you down at the table. You’re going to be busy enough running and teaching the game without trying to rebuild encounters on the hoof.

Also, if you have any quick rules handouts, bring them along. Wizards did a great two-page sheet for the D&D Experience this past spring that I’m going to print out, for example. Make sure you have a copy for each of your players.

Here’s a little tip about printed material: if they’re going to be used by multiple groups, make them sturdy. Either print them out on cardstock, or spring for some clear page protectors and a box of dry erase markers. It’ll save you time and heartache between groups.

Aside from the printed materials, make sure you’ve got enough dice and writing implements for everyone. Don’t expect your audience to bring what they need – anticipate what’s needed, and provide it.

As for play aids that make the game more cool, you can go as nuts as you have time for, here. At a minimum, I’m going to be bringing a miniature suitable for each PC, and suitable minis for the monsters. I’m also going to lay out the encounters using my Dungeon Tiles, possibly with a home-made battlemap for the final encounter that I put together in Dundjinni. That, plus my DM Screen and combat tracker pad – both of which fall into both categories of play aids.

Put everything – adventure, characters, play aids – together into something you can carry easily. Check it all, and make sure you haven’t forgot anything. Specifically, make sure you haven’t forgot your dice; trust me when I say that it can happen, and it sucks.

That’s the way I put together a demo. Of course, building a demo and running a demo are two different things. Next post I’ll talk about how I run the demos.

Dungeons & Dragons Insider – So Far, So Good

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Before I get rolling in my assessment of DDI, I want to remind folks in Winnipeg that I will be running D&D 4E demos at Imagine Games on Saturday, November 29, and Saturday, December 13. Games will start at 1:00. Sessions are limited to 6 players, so get there early if you want to guarantee a seat at the table. I’ll provide minis, pregenerated characters, and dice, so all you need to bring is yourself.

There. End plug. Let’s talk about Dungeons & Dragons Insider.

I, like a lot of people, was a little bit leery of the new digital initiative over at Wizards. The idea of having to shell out a subscription fee for electronic access to more D&D content struck me, initially, as pretty distasteful.

When I thought about it for a bit, though, I decided it wasn’t that bad. I was already shelling out 20 bucks a month buying Dungeon and Dragon magazines from the local game shop. Spending that on electronic versions was a bit much, but when you tack on the extras, it started to look a little more reasonable. Of course, this was before any pricing was announced. Currently, if you subscribe for a year, you get the two magazines at $4.95 a month, which is pretty decent.

Now, the price is going to go up as more and more tools come online for the system. I’m okay with that, as long as the tools they build are useful and functional, and the price stays in step with what I feel they’re worth.

Anyway, I subscribed.

I’m not totally sold on the whole thing, though; I think they’re off to a pretty good start, but I’m withholding final judgement. Here’s my thinking on the various components so far.

  • Dragon Magazine. Dragon’s doing a really good job of providing extra options for characters. That’s been my one reservation (well, my main reservation, anyway) about 4E – it’s early in the product life span, so there’s just not as many options available. Dragon’s helping to ease that concern, and the look at playtest files for things like the Artificer, Barbarian, and Bard classes gives me a better idea of the kind of depth of support and development Wizards has planned. Overall, thumbs way up.
  • Dungeon Magazine. This I’m not as enthusiastic about. The articles are pretty good, but I find that the adventures are a little less than thrilling. Sure, it’s early days yet, but the folks at Wizards just don’t seem to be taking any chances with their adventures. Pretty much everything is a dungeon crawl, with a few encounters on the way to the dungeon crawl, and maybe a few encounters on the way back from the dungeon crawl. While I find the adventures very useful for seeing the way encounters can be put together, and they can be stripmined for new monsters and traps, I just find them very bland. Safe, I guess, in that they are aimed at the very basics of the game. In comparison with what Paizo’s doing in the Pathfinder line, they really come out second best. Most specifically, the Scales of War Adventure Path just doesn’t compare to the Pathfinder Adventure Paths in terms of variety of activity and interesting options. Ah, well, as I say, it’s early days. I’m willing to give them a while to start stretching themselves.
  • D&D Compendium. I haven’t really used this much, though I can see it being useful. It just hasn’t come up so far. I think it’s a good idea in theory, but I really can’t say more about it than that.
  • Encounter Builder. I can see this becoming more useful to me as I learn the game more. Right now, I find it more helpful to page through the books looking for the right mix of monsters, because I don’t know what all of them do, yet. Still, it’s very handy for figuring out the XP budget for each encounter, and telling you whether it’s an easy, average, or hard encounter for your target party. I like it, but haven’t used it extensively.
  • Ability Generator. This is okay, but I’m assuming that it’s going to be superseded by the Character Builder. As a stand-alone thing, I don’t much see the point.
  • Monster Builder. Building monsters in 4E is a lot quicker than in other editions (and I know what I’m talking about: I built 30 3E monsters for the Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary). This little tool makes it even easier. The one catch is that it doesn’t seem to do Elite or Solo monsters, which is disappointing. Having said that, it does all the heavy lifting, math-wise, for normal monsters, and the explanation in the DMG of how to improve them to Elite or Solo is pretty straightforward. It’s good, but not perfect. Also, I’ve yet to be able to get the formatted stat block view to work. Still, it shows great promise.
  • Character Builder. This is currently in closed beta testing, and only goes up to 3rd level. But I have to say that it’s pretty sweet. There are some weird things about it and a glitch or two, but this is a beta, and that’s to be expected. I’m not going to talk about the problems here, because I have every confidence that they’ll be corrected before release (the one-day turnaround time on the Vista x64 issue fix shows how serious they are about fixing things). What I will say is that I’m going to be using this tool to create all the pregen characters for my 4E demos, and it’s going to take me about a quarter of the time of using one of the form-fillable character sheets out there. When this is finalized, it’s going to be worth the price of admission all on its own, I think.
  • Upcoming Features. The three other things they’re talking about adding to the DDI offering are the Character Visualizer, the Dungeon Builder, and the D&D Game Table. I’m not all that interested in the D&D Game Table – my game schedule is full enough, without trying to cram in virtual sessions. The Character Visualizer seems like a neat toy, but I’ve been unimpressed with the quality of the art that I’ve seen in the previews. I’m guessing it will be better in the release, but it’s still not something that really draws me, though I’ll probably spend some time playing with it. The Dungeon Builder seems to be the item that I’d use most, especially if it has the option of printing out battle maps, but I don’t see that on the list of features. We’ll have to wait and see.

So, there it is. In general, I like where DDI is headed, though I have a few reservations. I’d like to see a broader variety of adventures in Dungeon, and I’m anxious for the extra features they’re developing. I’m tentatively sold on it. We’ll have to see how well it lives up to its promise.

The Thing About Skill Challenges

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Mike Mearls is writing a two-part article for Dragon Magazine about skill challenges. If you have a subscription to Dungeons & Dragons Insider, you can read the first part here. Now, he’s just laying the groundwork for a discussion of running skill challenges, but it’s pretty good stuff, so far, talking about when a skill challenge is appropriate, and when it isn’t, and how to put in a good mix of skills so everyone in the party can contribute. I’m looking forward to the next installment.

Having said that, I’ve got some thoughts of my own on skill challenges, based on running a couple of published ones, and creating and running a couple of my own.

When I first read the 4E DMG, I thought skill challenges were a great idea. They provided a way to implement game mechanics into what had formerly been mechanic-less scenes in adventures, and a way to calculate experience awards for these scenes. Great, right?

Well, yes and no.

See, if you turn every scene that was previously resolved by role-playing into a scene with dice mechanics, you can lose a lot of flavour and spontaneity and interaction. It becomes a different kind of combat in the minds of many of the players. On the other hand, having clear mechanics for some interactions can be a real boon for some players and characters, especially those who have trained up the interpersonal skills.

My own view on skill challenges is that they’re a good thing, but you have to use them appropriately. I’ve found that having a skill challenge in place to see if the characters accomplish something doesn’t work too well: if failing prevents them from accomplishing something important to the adventure, it can derail the entire thing, but if failing doesn’t have a penalty, it’s not interesting, so why devote all the time to the skill challenge?

My solution to this has been to put skill challenges in place to add complexity to the narrative of the adventure. For example, in my Storm Point campaign, the first session started with a skill challenge to track down a group of goblins rumoured to have a map to a previously-undiscovered ruin. Now, the characters were going to find the goblins no matter what, but I wanted to see how they might decide to go about it. They used their Nature and Perception skills to try and track the goblins down, but didn’t get too much good information that way. When they started interviewing the farmers in the surrounding area (using Streetwise and Diplomacy), they found out about a halfling who traded with the goblins, and then leaned on him (Intimidate) to get him to tell them where he met the goblins to trade.

The success of the challenge let the players surprise the goblins, which allowed them to run roughshod over the little beggars. If they had failed, the goblins would have been ready for them, and laid a trap. But the way the characters went about locating the goblins added some complexity to their story: they now have a rivalry with a halfling criminal, and have let the people in and around Storm Point know that they’re out looking for ruins and the wealth they contain.

By allowing the characters to run free with this skill challenge, I got to let them set the pace and flavour of the their search. Sure, I made some notes about how different skills might be used and the results thereof, and I created an NPC that could be slotted in as an information source, but I really let the players dictate the direction of the inquiries, and the method of the search. It told me a lot about how they viewed this new game world, and what they saw as their place in it.

The other thing I used skill challenges for was to introduce complications into what could otherwise be a long, boring part of the game. For example, the characters, after obtaining the goblins’ map and locating the chasm marked on it, had to climb down into the rift to find the ruins. Instead of just calling for Athletics rolls to see if they make the climb, I turned it into a skill challenge. They used Athletics and Acrobatics, of course, but also Dungeoneering, Endurance, Nature, and a few other skills. Instead of setting a pass/fail condition for the challenge as a whole, every time they failed, I threw a complication at them: a rock slide, an attack by a cavern choker, what have you. This turned a fairly boring set of rolls into a more exciting challenge, with each failure meaning some sort of obstacle to overcome.

What I don’t do anymore is use skill challenges to replace role-playing. In the first Scales of War game, there is a skill challenge (granted, it’s optional) where you try to convince the town council to hire you to fetch back the kidnapped townspeople. It’s listed pretty much whole-cloth from the DMG’s example of negotiating with nobility. I think everyone in on this one found it to be artificial and rather stilted, especially as we were using the pre-errata rules, where it was run pretty much like a combat*.

No, I find that it’s one thing to let people roll for their characters’ skills during a role-played encounter, and quite another to turn the whole thing into a succession of dice rolls. Granted, some of that feeling of “combat by other means” resulted from my inexperience using the rules, but the nature and the structure of the skill challenge seemed lacking. Far better, in my opinion, to role-play it, and call for rolls when necessary.

The other thing I really disliked about it was the automatic failure skill – basically a landmine in the challenge that blows up on you if you try the wrong thing. I hate this. Skill challenges, in my opinion, should be opportunities for players to try things that their characters are good at, not creep carefully through the encounter, going with choices that they know are safe. They should be trying different, exciting things to get the encounter moving.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the structure and use of skill challenges. Right now, I’ve got the notes for a skill challenge that should make up an entire adventure, as the characters take on a crime boss in Storm Point. Each success gives them an encounter based on what they’re trying to do, and each failure gives them an encounter where they’re at a disadvantage. Success and failure both lead to a final showdown, but the odds will be swayed one way or the other depending on whether the challenge was a success or failure.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

 

*If you are unaware of the errata, I suggest you check it out. It gets rid of the initiative roll, and the combat round sequence of skill challenges, making them more free-flow and intuitive.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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First off, I’m going to be running some D&D 4E demos at Imagine Games & Hobbies again. These will take place on Saturday, November 29, and Saturday, December 13. If you’re in Winnipeg, and want to try out D&D 4E in a friendly, non-threatening environment, come on down and bounce some dice with us. I’ll post more details here as I hammer them out with the store.

Anyway, on to the main topic.

I ran the second session of my new Storm Point campaign this past Sunday. Again, it went quite well. We were one man short, so one of the other players took over running his character for the session. These are the rules we hashed out at the start of this campaign, mainly to make my life as GM easier:

  1. I keep a copy of all character sheets.
  2. We run as long as four out of six players show up.
  3. The characters of absent players get played by someone who is present.
  4. No one ever plays more than two characters.
  5. No one ever has to double-up on characters twice in a row.
  6. All six characters get equal shares of the XP.

This set of rules prevents a couple of things that we ran into in the 3.5 campaign, when we would leave out the characters of absent players. First, I don’t have to try to adjust the encounters on the fly based on who shows up. Second, we don’t wind up with an XP gap between characters.

So, we had the full party when they got to the main adventure site. I threw a combat at them as they made camp for the night, a group of representatives from the Empire Reborn trying to take their map to the ruins by force. This was more of a challenging fight than they’d had up to that point, because the foes were of a more appropriate level, and were intelligent and unsurprised. They got worried a couple of times during the combat, which was good.

After that, there was a skill challenge to wend their way down through the treacherous chasm to the actual ruins of an Arkhosian outpost. Each failure they rolled produced some sort of setback: a rockslide, an attack by a cavern choker, etc. Also, each round of the challenge, they had to make an Endurance check or lose a healing surge from fatigue, random battering, bad air, etc.

Waiting for them at the bottom of the chasm was the toughest fight so far: a Level 3 encounter with a nest of kruthiks. Four hatchlings, two adults, and a hive lord. This was a close fight, with the cleric actually dropping at one point, and everyone rather battered and torn at the end, but they prevailed.

Again, everyone had fun, it seemed, and the various encounters worked well and were exciting. I’m gonna close this post with a quote from the player of Thrun the Anvil, dwarven fighter, who also ran Milo Tarn, human swordmage, in this session:

Lessons I learned:

– Thrun needs to pay more attention to protecting the healer.

– Thrun needs to stay closer to the pack in combat. I think what I *should* have done was to maneuver to force the critter he was fighting into the group via tide of iron instead of hanging out over by the pillar, just the two of us.

– I’d like to get/ask for/make a power card for Thrun’s challenge.

– Fighter’s challenge + enemies with reach = win. Thrun just hammered the crap clean out of that poor choker.

– Gaining healing triggers should be a priority for Thrun as I advance him through levels. Because of this, it’s also probably going to work better if I don’t burn the feat at second level to get him the craghammer and instead take a feat that extends his survivability either by mitigation (heavy armor or the like), or by endurance.

– Greenflame blade can be an awesome mook eraser.

– Aegis on one target at range + booming blade on a different, adjacent target = nice control.

– Aegis on one target at range + booming blade on a different, adjacent target = a big dent in my HP.

– Being hit by status effects sucks.

– For each additional status effect you are hit with, the suck amplifies as a product of cubes into the ultrasuck range.

Looking forward to the next game.

Back for More – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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So, after the devastating and anti-climactic TPK two weeks ago, my Sunday group, affectionately known as the Geek Game, decided that they wanted to play 4th Edition D&D for the next campaign. I agreed – hell, I encouraged it. I’ve been itching to run more 4E stuff, and I’ve been wanting to try out building adventures and campaigns in the new system.

I got some opinions from folks about what kind of game they wanted. The consensus was to leave behind the adventure paths and play in a game that, while it may have some throughlines of story, is more episodic, with the adventures being a little more self-contained. They also voted not to use Forgotten Realms, which is the only full setting currently published.

Again, I was okay with that. I came up with the idea of the fishing/mining town of Storm Point, that was on the frontier of the human empire a century ago, and barely noticed when the empire fell. I wanted a frontier, Deadwood kind of feel to the place, with little contact with the larger world and no external authority. I decided that representatives from some powerful neighbouring city-states and kingdoms had recently started paying attention to Storm Point because of the fact that it sits in the middle of the remains of three much older empires, and the ruins and treasure they contain. Most locals don’t care too much about that, but outsiders have started showing up, wanting to do some looting, and wanting the support of the town to do so.

I put together a couple of pages of notes into a campaign handout, told them what books they could use for their characters, and they got to creating them. We wound up with:

  • Ssudai T’kar, a dragonborn rogue (Ahem! Commando!)
  • Thrun the Anvil, a dwarf fighter
  • Soren Greensword, a human warlord
  • Faran Brae, an elf cleric
  • Galvanys i’Araukamegil, an eladrin ranger
  • Milo Tarn, a human swordmage

I also let them vote on what their first adventure would be, based on the writeups in the campaign handout, and they decided to go after some ruins from one of the older empires. I sat down with the DMG and the MM, and had the notes I needed for the adventure done in about an hour. I spent another hour to an hour and a half typing up the notes and statblocks I needed to run the game.

And I was done.

Two and a half hours to put together an adventure designed to take a party of six from first level to second level. I had time to create a map of the campaign area, and a prop map for the adventure.

I’m liking that a lot.

Anyway, last night we ran for the first time. We got started a little late, and there was some general hullabaloo that slowed us down some, but we got through two encounters, and everyone had a good time.

The first encounter was a mix of a skill challenge and combat, with the characters completing a skill challenge to locate a band of goblins with a map to an undiscovered ruin complex, and then taking the map away from them. They did some scouting of the nearby area, and figured out the general area the goblins would have to be, then talked to the farmers in the area to find out if there was any sign of goblins. They found out that one of the ne’er-do-wells in the town’s halfling community had been seen apparently trading with the goblins, so they went to his boat and put the fear of several gods into him until he told them where to find the goblins. After that, it was a simple matter of sneaking up on the goblin camp, pushing several of them into the fire, and putting the rest to the sword.

The second encounter was straight combat, with a pack of hyenas attacking them on the way to the place marked on the map.

Overall, I’d have to say it went very well. Everyone seemed to have fun, and they liked discovering the different ways their characters could work together, uncovering the synergy of the different powers. And they seem pretty anxious for the next game, two weeks from now.

I have to admit that I am, too.

Actually Playing 4E

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I know! Two posts in two days!

So, despite my resolve to wait until there were more options out there before starting a 4th Edition D&D game, I broke down and started a 4th Edition D&D game.

Those who know me are not surprised.

I wanted to get some practice running the game, get familiar with the rules and things, while I prepare the campaign I’m going to launch some time next year. This would give me a chance to build some proficiency with the new system, and get my head around what sorts of things a campaign needs that can be best modeled by the new rules.

Now, because I was coming in green, I wanted to use a pregenerated campaign, and Wizards of the Coast graciously provided their Scales of War adventure path. That made it easy. So, I sent out invites to eight gamers I know, hoping for four or five acceptances.

I got seven.

And then one of them asked if they could bring a friend. Back up to eight players.

Well, I decided, I wanted to see how much faster these rules were in play. This would give them a damned good stretching.

So how’s it going? First, some observations about the adventures.

  • They are (so far; we’re at #3 right now) fairly well-written. There are some nice encounters, and some interesting decisions to make.
  • There’s plenty of dungeon crawling going on. Too much? That’ll vary depending on your group, but it’s pushing the limits of my tolerance.
  • There are interesting little links, mainly using skill challenges, that break up the dungeon crawl monotony.
  • Starting especially in the second adventure, there’s plenty of opportunity for improvised little side adventures and extended roleplaying. Not so much in the first, which tends to drop you in the middle of the action and then give you a time-sensitive mission.
  • The editing on the second adventure is really sub-par, with missing labels being one of the more annoying aspects.

Now, as to playing the adventures:

  • After character generation, we had a tiefling warlock, a tiefling rogue, a dragonborn fighter, a dragonborn paladin, a human cleric, a human wizard, a half-elf ranger, and a half-elf fighter.
  • There are issues with running this large a group in any system. These were exacerbated in this game because none of us were overly familiar with the rules. Things dragged, no one got enough DM face time, and little timing misjudgements I made snowballed into huge problems.
  • Two players bowed out after the second session, saying that the group was just too large. They were right.
  • Six is much more manageable.
  • Leaving your rogue out front with no back-up in hostile territory will do bad things to the rogue.
  • Skill challenges have a lot of potential, but some practice is needed to run them as something more than a non-physical combat. Also, having skills that automatically grant failures seems designed to punish players for trying to stick to what their characters are good at. Skill challenges should encourage players to take risks, not devolve into a guessing game to see where the booby-trapped skills are.
  • Combat encounters still take a fair bit of time to run. Now, part of that is lack of experience with the system, and part of that is the fact that monsters have significantly more hit points on average, which makes the combats run a larger number of rounds.
  • The new system actively rewards you for co-operating in your party and playing to your strengths. After some shaky combats, the players started to see how to make their characters work together to support each other. The last fight of the last session was a complete slaughter of the monsters.
  • Adding Campaign Coins to the game has been fun.
  • Doing up customized cards for powers and magic items can greatly speed play. You can check out some templates here. Personally, I use the Power and Item Cards by JFJohnny5. Thanks, Johnny!
  • I got some Alea Tools magnetic markers to track bloodied, marked, and cursed conditions, but they were too attractive to each other, and wound up being more trouble than they were worth. Apparently, if you have a magnetically receptive play surface, they don’t push and pull your figures around nearly as much. I’ll have to see what I can find, but for now, I’m looking for a different way to handle this. Any suggestions are welcome.
  • Speaking of marked, I like what this condition is trying to do, which is make enemies attack someone who is very much a threat to them, but I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a less fiddly way of handling it. It can be a bit of a challenge to keep track of whom has been marked by who.
  • There has been some comment that combat seems very repetitive, because characters use the same powers over and over again. I find this confusing to me, because in 3.5, characters just used the same attacks over and over again, and the people complaining didn’t find that repetitive. Maybe this is an artifact of the low level limited number of powers; we’ll have to see how things change as the game progresses.

So, what’s the verdict? Among my players, it’s that 4E is a good system. It’s not the second coming, it won’t end world hunger, or bring about peace in the Middle East, but it works for what it sets out to do. Mostly, anyway. It’s easily as good as 3.5, and if there are places where it doesn’t quite measure up, there are also places where it outshines the former system significantly.

And my opinion? Well, let me put it this way. The adventure path I’m using is written for five characters. When I found out I was going to have eight, I went through and beefed up the encounters to be appropriate for that number of characters. The guidelines in the DMG on how to do this are very, very clear. The process is very simple. It took me under an hour to update over a dozen encounters, and that includes a couple where I had to increase the level of the monsters, rather than just add extras. When two players dropped out, it was even faster to adjust for that. And I’ve been getting faster with each adventure. This means I’m spending my prep time fleshing out background, making props and cards for treasure, updating power cards for the players, and reading the next adventure.

This, I like. This is what sells me on 4E.