Page 17 of HotFL has an “Example of Play”: pretty much the same one in the 4e PHB, except that there are mysterious differences.
The names have been changed: The DM is now named Chris and not Dave, and the other player and character names have changed as well. There are a few additions, too. I’ll quote it (keeping the old names) and bold the new text.
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Heroes of the Fallen Lands
Somehow, the image’s irregular border fools my eye into thinking it’s a more interesting setting. My brain reads the dungeon wall as a Great Wall of China-style outside wall, with a white sky above it. The two adventurers are standing before a gate, holding off undead. I imagine the walls continuing for thousands of miles in either direction, protecting – the Fallen Lands? – from a continent’s worth of undead. Now that’s a setting!
Oh, so here’s a difference between the PHB and HotFL. The PHB subtitle is “Arcane, Divine and Martial Heroes”. The HotFL’s is “Create and Play Clerics, Fighters, Rogues, and Wizards!” The HotFL subtitle has a certain something that the PHB subtitle lacks. And that certain something is an exclamation point!
It’s surprisingly strange to hold a D&D book as small as Heroes of the Fallen Lands. I’ve been reading multicolumn D&D books – either hardcover or magazine size – for more than 20 years. My brain can barely cope with the lack of an alley between columns. And there seem to be so few words per page! What would fit on one column of the PHB takes up a page of a trade paperback.
I am surprised that this makes such a difference to me. If I like large-format books so much, the logical extension is to print books on the largest possible pieces of paper – perhaps the PHB 1 should have been printed on pages the size of a foldable poster map. It’d take about thirty-five of them.
Heroes of the Fallen Lands
I walked out of the store with only “Heroes of the Fallen Lands”. And a used copy of a Gary Gygax novel, “The Samarkand Solution”. Unless there is a surprising groundswell of interest in the latter, I will liveblog only “Heroes of the Fallen Lands”.
Regrets? I have a few. Should I go back and get the dice? If I do, how can I liveblog them?
Oops… somehow during our Red Box liveblog, we wrote a post about the Essentials fighter and never published it! Might as well post it now…
On my first time through Essentials character creation, I’m playing a fighter. A green-skinned fighter with rainbow hair. In my first combat, I learn about standard, move, and minor actions, hit rolls, defenses, and damage rolls (not that damage matters, because my opponents are minions). I’m also told about my fighter stances, Poised Assault and Battle Fury. The game tells me that in this case, I really should use Poised Assault. And that’s the end of the tactical thinking. The fighter path is the simplest of the paths. There are no tactical or power decisions to make. However, the fighter path has one difference from the other three classes: it’s possible to die.
The Wizard, Rogue and Cleric paths last a few rounds, max, so you’re guaranteed to win before you can possibly accumulate enough damage to die. The fighter, though, keeps on exchanging attacks with his goblin minion opponent until one of them dies. The goblin minion’s chances of victory are slim, but they are there: D&D joins Space Opera and Traveller as games in which a character can die during character creation.
Note that if you are reduced to 0 HP, you don’t technically die, you “lose consciousness”. You don’t wake up, though: you start the CYOA over, just as if you had died. The unconsciousness/death text-block admonishes you to “make sure you are using all the right numbers for your attack bonus and defenses”, because, honestly, you died against a minion?
To be fair, you probably wouldn’t die, since presumably the other members of the party are around to help you maybe! And you’d have to fail THREE saving throws before someone came around and made a DC 10 heal check to trigger your second wind and bring you back into the fight. And it would be a cruel DM who would have the goblin minion repeatedly coup de grace you to kill you before you’ve even really started playing the game. That would take 3 coup de graces!
I do like that they deal with the possibility of going unconscious, especially since they explain that going unconscious isn’t the same as dying and dying isn’t even necessarily permanent!
So Essentials: Heroes of the Fallen Lands should be available at some stores tomorrow! If I can pick one up, I might live-blog it if I get it. Check out blogofholding.com over the weekend.
The Ravenloft board game uses stripped-down D&D 4e rules, which means that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s auditioning to become the real D&D rules. I think each piece of the whole baroque structure of D&D should be examined for freshness daily.
Notably absent from Ravenloft are the Non AC Defenses (NADs): Reflex, Fortitude, and Will. Every Ravenloft attack targets AC. I gotta tell you… I didn’t miss my NADs.
Reflex, Fortitude, and Will saving throws, introduced in 3e, were a huge advance from the saving throws of 1e and 2e. 4e further improved the system by having the attacker, not the defender, roll the d20. I think the next big improvement – maybe in 5e – might be to eliminate the whole subsystem. Whaa? Paul, you’re crazy! I know, right?
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Laura Redcloud’s review of “How We Decide” gives me some (pseudo?)science to justify something I already believe:* random game rewards are more fun.
[W]e get pleasure when our (subconscious) expectations of reward are met, and we feel upset when those expectations are dashed. Additionally, we get extra dopamine when the reward is surprising. So, what we like, from most to least:
-2 Surprising disappointment
-1 Predictable disappointment
+1 Predictable confirmation of expectations
+2 Surprising confirmation of expectations
1e D&D is a hulking eldritch megabeast born from a mad wizard’s experimental combination of surprising rewards and surprising punishments.
4e repudiated randomness for sanity, balance, and survivability. On the whole, 4e is stronger for it.
Treasure, though, is an area where randomness should reign.
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This morning I claimed that monsters gain too many HP per level, based on the fact that a) PC damage increases by 1 point per attack, and b) the design intent is that monsters be killed by 4 attacks.
Check my math! I said that a reasonable average damage for level-30 at-wills is 38 HP (or slightly more for a striker). Can you guys make me some builds? (Remember, these are all-around decent character builds, not optimized-for-damage builds.) The rules are: you choose a class, an at-will power, an attribute arrangement of your choice, and no more than 4 feats and 2 magic items.
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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Be a wine snob!
Wine snobbery, along with an upper-class accent and a superciliously raised eyebrow, is one of the great, easy markers of the upper class. If the PCs hobnob with nobles, then they must drink wine. Invent a superior wine for the extra-elite to drink: it won’t take long before the PCs will know when they’re getting the best.
When giving PCs wine, let them make a History check. If they succeed, they know the wine’s quality, and the player may talk about its “oakiness”, “untertones of astral currant” and “tanens” for one full minute before anyone is allowed to hit them.
Wine snobbery, and overpriced vintages, have been around forever. A good Tokay was quite expensive in the medieval period, and Louis XV called it the “Wine of Kings, King of Wines”. Falernian is mentioned in a lot of Roman authors. On a wall in a Pompeii bar it says: “For one coin you can drink wine. For two you can drink the best. For four you can drink Falernian.”
In my campaign, I’ve invented a few beverages. The Talasay is the most sought-after: a bottle of the Talasay ’82 in a treasure horde might be worth more than the rest of the treasure. Its quality is only exceeded by the emerald wine of the fey lords, after drinking which, it is said, all other wines taste like ash. On the other side of the spectrum, there’s Dogsbreath, good enough only for dwarves to drink.
