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Mazes and Monsters retro clone 7: beware of the sacrilege!

Monday, September 20th, 2010
This entry is part 7 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

We last left off with Tom Hanks and his friends in the middle of a new, LARP-enhanced version of Mazes and Monsters. They just encountered a skeleton, so we should finally get a chance to see how they’ll handle combat so we can find out how that mechanic works, and… oh. Oh. They’re not going to fight the skeleton. They’re going to talk to each other. Roleplay.

Girl: Perhaps there is a clue hidden in the skull!
Hanks: (in a squeaky, panicked voice) Beware of the sacrilege!
Girl: Glacia the fighter is not afraid.

As Glacia the fighter approaches the skeleton, it is suddenly pulled up, out of the shot; presumably by a system of ropes and pulleys rigged up by Jay Jay, who, in addition to free run of the Theater Department and Anatomy Skeleton Department, apparently has the key to the Ropes and Pulleys Department. Either things are invisible when they are on the ceiling, or the characters can only see things in-frame, or Jay Jay’s system of ropes and pulleys pulls the skeleton down the tunnel and around the bend, because the skeleton, mouth flashlight and all, is now gone.

Showing bizarre and amazing lumination-location memory, Blondie says, “Look! where the light was pointing!”

Look! Where the light was pointing!


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Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, game design, legacy D&D, news, other systems | 4 Comments »

Feats from Heroes of the Fallen Lands

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Expertise Feats

Heroes of the Fallen Land offers a slew of new expertise feats and a change to weapon focus to limit it only to implements (while simultaneously bringing in implement focus to the mix). Consequences below:

  1. More Errata Anyone?: Expertise feats released prior to HotFL increased to a +2 bonus at 15th level and a +3 bonus at 25th level, where as these new ones increase at 11th and 21st. This leaves people with weird implements, such as tomes, or people who use multiple implements and want to take advantage of versatile expertise, in an annoying situation of waiting several levels to catch up to their fellow players using trendier implements and weapons. Obviously this an oversight that any DM with brains will house rule, but it probably should be errata’d for official events and the like.
  2. Racial Powers: A minor gripe, but I always think of it when a new expertise feat comes out. Racial powers are still left in the dust, falling 1-3 points behind the attack rolls of other powers since they have no applicable expertise feats to help them.
  3. Hello Implement Focus!: This is a feat spell casters have been waiting a long time to get. Coordinating the ability scores and the powers needed to get any use out of the energy boosting damage feats was a chore that usually couldn’t work out and wasn’t worth a relatively modest boost to damage. Implemented Expertise makes it simple.
  4. Where is the love for weapon/implement dependency?: A lot has been done for classes that rely, or choose to use, multiple implements and weapons as part of their build. For example, there are several weapons available, such as the bard’s songblade, that count as a weapon and an implement, thus eliminating the need to purchase/discover an extra magic item. HotFL come out with a very nice expertise feat, Master at Arms, that allows a warrior to get a bonus to attacks with all weapons, without having to grab up a bunch of new feats. Unfortunately, the focus feats still miss the mark, and the recent change to weapon focus has taken away the ability to snatch an easy damage bonus for a weapon used both as a weapon and an implement (such as a pact blade or songblade). It’s a fairly minor bonus, sure, probably 5-10% of the damage you do, but it’s not entirely unconsequential, and it would be nice to be able to add damage to both types of attacks without having to take an extra feat.
  5. House Rules: A house rule I’ve been using, which I understand is in use by some folks from WotC as well, is to give everyone a special version of expertise that gives a feat bonus that scales with level to all attacks. The reasoning is that expertise is a 100% must have feat that seems like it was put in more to fix a numbers issue with monster defenses increasing too swiftly relative to PC attack bonuses than any other compelling reason. With the advent of all these new expertise feats, I’m trying to decide what to do! I think I might experiment with allowing someone to swap in one of these feats in place of my generic expertise feats. This way, if they really do plan on ultra-specializing with one weapon or implement (which probably 75% of all classes do), they can take one of these feats. If they want ultimate flexibility with weapons, implements, and racial powers, they can keep my made-up feat.

Other Feats

Aside from the expertise feats and implement focus, which I’ve already covered, there are some pretty BOSS feats in Heroes of the Forgotten Lands! Highlights follow:

Disciple of Lore: This feats gives a +1 bonus to skills with which you have training. A pretty efficient feat when you consider how many skills can get the bonus, and fun for maxing out skills with all possible bonuses!

Improved Defenses: Wow, a feat that gives a +1 to all non AC defenses that scales with tier, making it twice as good as Paragon Defenses, which I almost always tried to take if at all possible! The only reason I could see for not taking this feat is that other superior feats for boosting specific defenses while giving other bonuses that I discuss below. Other than that, I suppose there are one or two classes that are so jam packed with crazy powerful feats, that they just don’t have time to take this one, but in my experience, those classes are few and far between.

Melee Training: An errata’d version of the old feat, which brings the power level down a bit. A necessary evil, to stop the purely dex based slayer and other potentially crazy builds with the new figher and rogue. A moment of silence, please, for all the builds that are taking a minor hit so that the warrior and rogue could use basic attacks as their only method of attacking…

Resilient Focus: Dude, I remember when only humans and half-elves could get a +2 bonus to Saving Throws and then only if they had spent an Action Point. Very close to being a must take for all classes by Paragon Tier (when status effects get nasty).

Superior Fortitude: Wow, a feat that gives +2 Fort AND resist versus ongoing damage that scales with tier! Why does it scale with tier anyway? This feat is noticably better than it’s paragon tier counterpart, which granted, never got taken.

Superior Reflexes: Another feat that combines two feats into one, giving a +2 to Reflexes that scales with tier and giving combat advantage against all enemies during your first turn in an encounter. Not amazing, but still a noticeable improvement!

Superior Will: This is one that I think anyone should seriously consider taking: a feat that gives a +2 bonus to will that scales with tier AND allows you to make a ST at the beginning of your turn to end the effect of being dazed or stunned. The three worst offenders as far as status effects are dazed, stunned, and dominated (at least, for those that come up with any kind of regularity). Making a save at the beginning of your turn to end two of those is HUGE.

Also, look how much better Swift Recovery is than Toughness:

Swift Recovery: You gain a +3 feat bonus to your healing surge value. The bonus increases to +4 at 11th level and +5 at 21st level.

Toughness: You gain 5 additional hit points. These additional hit points increase to 10 at 11th level and 15 at 21st level.

More Essentials thoughts…

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hit point lessons from mm3 on a business card

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

It seems to me that 4e monster Hit Points don’t scale properly.

From examining the MM3 on a business card, we see that every level, monsters get +1 to hit, defenses, and damage. At level 1, they have about 32 HP, and they get 8 HP per level.

(From what I’ve seen, PCs tend to have comparable to-hit, defenses, and at-will damage. Of course, over the course of a fight, PCs are better than monsters, due to encounter and daily powers, feats, and other complications. In the simplest cases, though, PCs and monsters can stand in for each other.)

So what’s the problem? As far as I can see, the monster math above suggests that at higher levels, fights will drag on longer as monsters gain proportionally more HP. And indeed, in practice, I see this happening. I recently ran a level 30 adventure, and the fights took forever. Here’s why:

Take a level 1 monster. He has 32 HP. He (and his opponents) do an average of 9 points of damage per hit. That’s great! That means it will take about 4 hits to kill a monster. A highly damaging hit (a crit or encounter power) might bloody the monster in one hit. That feels exactly right to me. In fact, according to this excerpt from Player’s Strategy Guide, 4 hits per monster is the design intention: “Assume that your heroes can kill a typical monster with four successful attacks.”

At level 1, we are exactly on target. However, monsters gain 8 HP per level! That means, in order to keep up, the PCs (who should be able to kill a monster in 4 hits) need to increase their average damage by 2, every level. In order to stay on par, all level-30 PCs (leaders and controllers as well as strikers) would need to be doing about 70 damage per hit. There’s no way they can do that! The result? Monster HP outstrips PC damage.
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Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, game design, RPG Hub | 9 Comments »

Rory’s Pocket Guide to D&D 4e – Playing Combat

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

I gave you some handy tips for Character Creation!

I set you straight on Roleplaying!

Now let’s focus on combat!

Combat

Combat in D&D is its own beast, and there are a lot of things to keep in mind when making decisions. In D&D 4e, the increased complexity can make for longer combats, so staying alert and knowing what to do is important!

  1. Make a game plan: When a combat starts and as it evolves, you should be making a game plan for how the encounter will be playing out. A few good questions to run through: Is this going to be a tough combat or is it just meant to drain my resources? Is there terrain I can take advantage of? What monsters should I be targeting? Should the party be staying close together or spreading out? Are there certain abilities that are going to be in high demand this combat, such as movement abilities, extra healing, and extra saving throws or bonuses? Being able to answer these questions will play a huge part in what resources you use and which abilities you know to keep track of so you aren’t left floundering when it comes time to act.
  2. The Three Action Tango: During other players’ turns you should usually be planning the three actions you’ll take on your turn: Standard, Move, and Minor. Obviously, you may need to reassess when your turn comes around since enemies might die or move around, but even a rough plan is VERY useful and will help the game run smoothly. For standard actions, you’re almost always looking at an attack power, so look through your encounters first and see if any are particularly appropriate; there is NO reason to be stingy with encounter powers. If not, turn to your trusty at-wills. If the fight is looking like it will be very difficult, go ahead and pop a daily if it will help the encounter significantly, since many have encounter long effects that will be more useful at the beginning of the battle than later on. For move actions, well, movement is pretty obvious, though keeping in mind that you can swap down to a minor is a good thing to do, especially for wizards who sometimes have multiple effects that they need to sustain. Think about where you’re going to need to move to get the best attack off, avoid dangerous situations, and get flanking bonuses. Finally, always think about something to do with your minor action. This will often mean popping a useful utility power, but it might also mean grabbing a potion or interacting in some way with the environment. (more…)

Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

sea dungeons

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

A nautical map – one with depth markings on it – can be a disguised dungeon setting.

Like a dungeon, it has constricted travel. If your ship draws 15 feet, you can’t sail through 10-foot-deep water. Those are like dungeon walls.

It’s a dungeon, though, where the walls are in different places for everybody. If your ship draws 20 feet, you have more walls than a ship that draws 10 feet.

I really should run a ship-to-ship combat among some reefs, where instead of drawing walls, I write depths on the battlemat (or just use a real nautical map). The larger, faster ships would have to sail around some obstacles that the smaller ships could ignore.

I have everything I need to run a pretty good sea combat. I have some “Pirates of the Spanish Main” ship minis, including a few galleys; and an 8-sided wind die, marked with the cardinal directions (N, NW W, etc.)

The die came with something called “Yachting: An Exciting Game” which turned out not to be exciting and in fact is only a game in the way that Candyland is a game. In yachting, apparently, the journey from the Atlantic to a port in Cape Cod is one in which the skipper is a powerless passenger at the mercy of the cruel winds which, 7 times out of 8, run the hapless ship aground. I think this might be a misrepresentation of yachting. Cute die, though, except when I accidentally roll for damage and get “Northwest”.

Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

Monster Manual 3 on a business card

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

With the changes to monster stats in Monster Manual 3, it’s now so easy to create monsters that I can fit all the formulae I need for attacks, defenses, and hit points on a wallet-sized piece of paper, and I’d still have room on the back to sell adspace (targeting the coveted 18-34 “people who are photo ID” demographic). In fact, I’m thinking of replacing MM3 with a business card.

Note: Through April 10, you can get MM3 business cards as a backer bonus for my Random Dungeon Generator poster!

Business card front

(high-quality printable version)

Business card back

(high-quality printable version)

Also on a business card:
Character Sheet on a business card

I like to come up with my own monsters on the fly. Once I come up with the idea of a giant roc with four elephant heads, I don’t need a Monster Manual to tell me that it has a fly speed, can make four grab attacks, and that it drops armored PCs onto sharp rocks to get at the food inside.

What I like the Monster Manual for is that it provides me numbers. If I want to run my Crowliphaunt as a level 12 elite brute, I can open the monster manual, look up a level 12 elite brute (flesh golem, for instance), and use its attack bonus, defenses, hit points, and damage expressions, swapping in my own damage types, status effects, and bizarre special abilities.

Really, though, there’s a lot of excess poundage in the Monster Manual that I don’t use every session. A while ago, I started running monsters using a cheat sheet listing the average defenses, hit points, etc. of each monster role, along with the damage expressions from DMG page 42. This cut down the Monster Manual to about a page.
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Rory’s Pocket Guide to D&D 4e: Part 1 – Character Creation

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

This is part of an exciting multipart series where I detail the steps I take when I play and run D&D 4E. It may not work for everyone. However, I have a lot of experience playing D&D, and I feel I have a good insight for what makes the game fun and engaging to play.

How to Make a Character

Note: Some of these tips may seem like they min/max or focus too much on mechanics, but I believe they allow you to create an effective and enjoyable character, one that is mechanically sound while sacrificing virtually nothing with regards to roleplaying or general fun.

Making a character is an exciting part of any D&D game! It has consequences for how enjoyable and engaging the game will be for you, your fellow players, and the DM. There are several factors to keep in mind when making a character:

  • What kind of character do you want to roleplay? My character’s personality will have a lot to do with the class and race I choose to play.
  • What kind of character will you enjoy playing mechanically? A class or race’s perception in the game world or in popular fiction may differ dramatically from how the class plays in combat.
  • What kind of character works best with your group dynamic? Having a good balance of the four roles is pretty important since it tends to make the group tougher as a whole, it makes for more interesting encounters (the all ranger group might turn out to be pretty potent but I bet it’s not super fun), and it tends to create more chances for each player to shine (if I do awesome heals and give super bonuses and you do awesome damage, then we BOTH shine if I setup an awesome attack for you).
  • What haven’t you played in a while? I like to mix things up when I play, rather than focusing on always playing a leader or striker or what have you.

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identify

Monday, April 5th, 2010

I applauded the removal of the Identify spell from 4th edition. It didn’t seem to add anything to have a “this item is unusable” period between the acquisition period and the use/sell period. Still, I now miss one thing about Identify: it gave the DM time to think.

I tend to DM pretty off-the-cuff, and I wish there was some way to drop treasure without either sticking slavishly to wishlists or preplanning everything. I’m thinking of changing the rules so that magic items enhancement bonuses are determined right away, but their properties are identified after an extended rest, or possibly at the DM’s discretion. That way I could decide to drop a character’s economy-mandated axe +3, but not have to immediately determine which of the scores of potential axes +3 it is. I could browse the Character Builder while the PCs are exploring or planning; or even react to the PCs’ adventures (a PC who hits with an opportunity attack finds herself holding an Opportunistic Axe).

Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools | 2 Comments »

disadvantages

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

I’ve been reading the first few issues of the Dungeons and Dragons comic from the 80’s. Spoilers ahead: in the first issue, the paladin fails in battle against the BBEG, and is struck with a Rod of Withering which renders his sword arm useless. Despondent, the paladin abandons his calling and becomes a drunken beggar – until a band of unlikely heroes convince him to return to adventuring!

I thought, this character would be fun to play! A severe combat limitation that would change your battle tactics, coupled with the kind of broad, slightly-overboard characterization you can get across in a RPG session.

At the end of the comic, the paladin’s stats were given. If I remember correctly, his post-withering strength was 3.

I thought, wow, that character would not be fun to play at all! Even in 1st edition, a strength of 3 would impose a -3 to attack rolls. In 3rd and 4th edition, that would be -4. In 4e math, where a primary stat of 16 (+3) means about a 50% chance to hit against most creatures of equal level, that would mean a character with 3 strength would hit on an 18-20. Of course, with the penalty to damage, you’d do about 1-2 damage when you did hit. That might be fun for an encounter, but it would be hard to maintain your enthusiasm throughout a combat-heavy adventuring career (or however long it took you to find Gauntlets of Ogre Power).
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D&D 4th Edition House Rules

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

With several dozen sessions under my belt, I feel like I’ve got a good understanding of what sorts of feat/power/item/class/ability combinations are “overpowered” in the sense that they make noticeably more powerful characters than already powerful and solidly built characters. These types of characters can really hurt the game, both trivializing the game experience for encounters and making other characters feel left out or almost useless in comparison.

With that in mind, I use several house rules in my game. Normally I shy away from house rules because they often cause unintended consequences in the game or are an attempt to fix an already hopelessly unbalanced game.

I made an exception for 4th edition for a few reasons, however:

1. It feels reasonably balanced!: With several exceptions, the game feels like the designers really put a lot of thought into balancing various classes, feats, and abilities, so house ruling should be able to help!

2. It’s modular: A lot of the problems in 4th edition aren’t problems with the basic system or HUGE inequalities between classes. They’re problems with SPECIFIC feats, items, and powers! It’s much easier to house rule by simply removing things than it is to come up with new rules to take their place.

My house rules are below. General principles are listed first, followed by specific changes:

Danger Areas: If your build takes advantage of one of these qualities then it might be overpowered! I’ll be adding to this section as new combinations occur to me.

Ongoing Damage Rolls: These “fire and forget” or “fire and maintain” abilities are so powerful because not only do represent an extra source of damage beyond what you would normally do every round, but they often end up doing even more damage, since no attack roll is needed.

Multiple Attacks: The simple fact is that as a player progresses in level, the majority of a player’s damage comes from bonuses to the damage roll, not the roll itself. Consider a fairly innocuous at will attack that does 1W worth of damage. By level 11, a typical character is probably adding at least 5 (for their ability) + 3 (for their weapon or implement) on top of that and could easily be adding an extra +2 for weapon focus, extra bonuses from other feats, item bonuses (if allowed), and numerous other bonuses from weapon powers (if allowed). Thus an attack that allows multiple attacks suddenly becomes noticeably more powerful than a similar ability that gives a 2W or 3W damage roll. The thing to keep in mind with ANY power that gives multiple attacks is that every single thing that gives a bonus to damage is applying two or more times to the multiple attack, and that includes increasing the critical hit chance of a weapon! House rule accordingly!
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