f13.net

I used to play D&D all the time when I was younger and had more time. I was the DM, and had a hugh collection of 2nd Edition books and a few 3rd. Some of my friends have recently been bugging me to start up another campaign, and it sounds like fun. So, I need to get back in to it. I am pretty excited to try 4th edition.

On to my questions.

What books do I need. We had an aborted attempt to start a campaign up like 6 to 9 months ago, and I bought a players handbook and a dungeon masters guide. Should I continue on with this set of 4th edition, or is there a new edition coming any time soon. If I should continue with this, I will make most of my players purchase Players Handbooks also.

Can anyone give me any advice on playing 4th Ed?

I also would like to purchase a dungeon adventure for my players. Something low level, and focused on dungeon crawling and not so much on roleplaying, which my groups isnt to into.

4th Ed is focused pretty strongly on miniature-based combat, so most adventures you get are probably not going to have much in the way of roleplaying.  On that note, you'll want to get some minis you like, at least for the PCs, because you're going to spend a lot of time moving them around a grid.

Everyone I know who plays a lot of 4th Ed has about a dozen books, because the core books leave a lot of stuff out.  If I were going to start a 4th Ed game I'd probably try to limit it to core books and ban anything else (as I did with 2nd Ed because I didn't want to have to keep track of shit that was in books I didn't own and didn't want to buy), but I'd probably get a lot of grousing about how I was nerfing this or that class because they need the stuff in supplement XYZ to be balanced and I'd probably end up caving in and dropping about $200 on more books.  So, keep that in mind as a possible danger.

Last summer I did a lot of work on 4th Edition.  I do no believe they have any immediate plans on a new edition.

My first set of advice is to download a torrent of the books.  I much prefer having books but right now I can't afford 100 bucks to buy all three players handbooks. 

Next, make sure you go through the books and prune what you want in your campaign.  Much like other editions, the more shit that they add in bloats the power levels of characters.  For example the third players handbook contains a psionic mineral-type pc.  Each of the handbooks for powersets also provide many new abilities which may not be suitable.

Be prepared for minatures and proper grid/tiles for your dungeons.  I painted up a huge set of handmade wood tiles.  The entire concept of 4th edition is set around miniature use.  All the powers of players and monsters are very clearly set down, and if you don't have accurate representation on the table of where shit is, you can lose a lot of gameplay power on either side.  This also requires you to be very familiar with rules and semantics.  Shifting, moving, voluntary movement, all can trigger abilities for example.

Don't be afraid to customize.  There is no more 'Kobold is half a hit die'  You can make whatever you want whatever level you want.  Utilizing the formulae for encounters based on character levels and number of them, it's easy to write up encounters full of stock mobs and custom mobs.  Since my group fluctuated in players present, I typically wrote up encounters for 3-7 players and it wasn't that difficult.

I have little in the way of dungeon adventures experiences, but the few I did play in were assrape.  Though I suspect that's because the DM was an idiot and didn't adjust it for players and levels.

Oh man, 4th ed is mini-based? I wondered why they were pushing so many painted plastics at the bookstore.

For 1st ed, we used an 8' cafeteria-style table covered in plexi and grease pencils for mapping/notes/art/etc. Worked really well and didn't cost much.

We actually used to make all our campaigns pretty miniature based so that actually sounds really good to me. I have a big box full of minis, and two big rollout vinal maps covered with hexes that I can use a dry erase on to draw stuff.

The 4e landscape has gotten fairly complicated lately with the addition of the Essentials line, which is not a new edition or a 'basic' version of the game - everything is fully compatible - but it does contain somewhat simplified versions of the classes that would probably be somewhat easier for new players to get into.

Probably the easiest way to do it is actually for someone in the group to pick up a subscription to their online thing, which gets you access to the character builder and all the material from every source, which is kept updated with all the errata and rules changes, and just have that person keep all the characters built in the online builder or whatever. It also gets you access to a crapload of pre-made adventures.

The only actual book you'd probably need to have at hand (assuming you had a web browser handy at your play site to look crap up in the compendium about powers and feats and such) is the Rules Compendium (http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Compendium-Essential-Dungeons-Dragons/dp/0786956216/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1302291329&sr=8-2) as the online thing doesn't have the actual game rules anywhere, just the powers/stat blocks/feats/etc. The Rules Compendium is the latest, best-indexed version of the actual rules of the game and I wouldn't skip it no matter which way you choose to go.


These things don't really have much to do with each other. The amount of roleplaying involved in a game is always down to the players, not the system.

Having some sort of battlemat and tokens to use for monsters and characters is pretty much essential for 4e, however. They don't sell the plastic minis line anymore but there is the Monster Vault available (http://www.amazon.com/Monster-Vault-Essential-Dungeons-Dragons/dp/0786956313/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302291370&sr=1-1) which has a bunch of cardboard tokens with monster art on them, that would probably be the best choice for starting out. You could also go crazy with dungeon tiles and stuff but the easiest thing would be just to get a traditional old vinyl battlemat (I think the Chessex ones are still the standard) and some wet-erase pens (Vis-a-vis overhead markers are the traditional choice - don't use dry erase.)

HOWEVER. All that said, you could just play with the original PHB and DMG and Monster Manual and have a fine old time, nothing says you have to play with all the errata and rules and balance changes and whatnot that have happened since those books came out. (You still need the mat and tokens though.)

I just wanted to say that this was probably the best premade dungeon I ever did. (I mostly designed my own dungeons). I was hoping to find something like this. I am not afraid to make my own, but for the first adventure as I am relearning new rules and stuff it would be easer to not have to rely on my own dungeon also.

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iBDQOXCHTEU/S8UjVRrEueI/AAAAAAAAAoE/MytIC0G5f-E/s320/forge.jpg)

I'd strongly recommend trying pathfinder (essentially D&D 3.75)
I really wanted to like 4th ed, bought the books etc. Played and ran a campaign. IMHO it just doesn't hold a candle to what Paizo (the publisher for Pathfinder) has done with the OGL and 3.5.

Paizo also has whole adventure paths. They are a string of modules. The first in a series takes characters from like 1-5 the next 6-10 and so on. Each building on the story of the previous.  


The reasons I like pathfinder better.
- it feels like you have more customization as a player. <- this may have changed with recent updates to 4ed
- The source books seem more focused
- everything about the game feels like it was made for d&d'rs by d&d'rs (if that makes any sense)
- it feels like a natural progression from where d&d was.
- the loot system in 4ed is just silly (woot I have a magic sword that can crit once a day!)
- I just liked it better :P

Pathfinder is still fun as a player (one of the groups I play in is running it instead of 4e and I am having plenty of fun.) However, I will never run a 3.5-type game, ever again. The difference in DM prep time for 4e, especially at high levels, is markedly in 4e's favor.

I really like 4th ed - it's treated me pretty well.   If you do their insider thing, you get the Character Builder, which is awesome, as well as access to the Scales of War adventure path (which is pretty damn good).  There's also a wiki for the scales path which contains maps you can print out on cardstock and cut for insta battlemats (I have access to super cheap printing, so it worked out well).

Things to immediately toss - the skill challenge system.  It's fucking awful.  

The essentials line streamlines things fairly well, and fixes some of the issues with Player HP/Damage vs Monster HP/Damage, but in general, anything that isn't out of the Monster Manual 3 book or later, you'll want to increase the damage a touch and cut the hitpoints by at least 33%.  Don't be afraid to tweak this as you get a better feel for your parties damage throughput.  

yeah there's no doubt that the prep time and options that wizards has provided (wheres the fucken dungeon creator you promised!!!) makes life easy.

That being said the Paizo adventure paths are awesome and then its only reading up before the session. You don't get much easier than that.

Of course if you are going homebrew for your campaign, then 4ed is nice.

JWIV is right that skill challenges right out of the book are... not good. DMG2 has some updated rules that make them work a little better, I can't remember if those are in the RC. They work alright for things like complicated traps and such, the social ones are where they tend to really break down I think.

Stewie pointed me here hoping I would explode all over the thread. He finds "flaws" in 4ed. I hate it with a burning passion.

I've played every version from the the basic box on, and each generation added something new to the whole genre. 4ed, just threw most of it out the window and said "let's make a table top mini game, give it powers that will remind people of WOW, and slap the D&D name on it."

4ed is not a bad game. It also however, is not D&D.

I could rant and rave about the draconian "balance" rules in the game, the complete lack of flavor, the abandonment of Vancian magic (heresy!), the cookie cutterness of the classes, the requirement of the holy quadrinity (tank, DPS, CC, Healer), the bloat of books adding more cookie cutter classes with the same rules and powers, but with different names...

Generally, I've stopped doing that. People ask me why I don't like it? I respond, "it doesn't feel like D&D - it feels like a board game".

Pathfinder however, I'm in love with. Yea, it has many of the flaws of 3.5, but they've made a real effort to adress many of the worst faults. Ultimately though, it lets the players decide whether or not they are going to play a challenging, balanced game - or if they are going to play over the top munchkins. 4ed basically hardcoded those kind of options right out of the game.

Recent Pathfinder game: Young woman raised in a monestary that was raided by river pirates. She survived and eventually joined the pirates. Monk 1/Fighter 6 (one hander)/Duelist 2. Specialized in fighting with just a rapier, had AC through the roof (all dodge) but didn't do much damage. Focused on moving around the fight, utilizing terrain, and when all else failed - kicking the Orc in the nuts (Improved Dirty Fighting). Had fights where I was jumping and swinging from ropes, flipping over tables, all that sort of stuff.

It was an underpowered, but fun character to play. It would have been impossible to reproduce the character in 4ed, and even more impossible to replicate a quarter of the tactics I would use. "Sorry, you can't swing from that rope at the Orc and try to kick him in the face, you already used that power this fight!"

I am currently playing a Pathfinder game we just started. I'm a Goblin Rogue 1/Ranger 1, disguised as a Dwarf named Harry Stonehead.  I have stilts and a fake beard to improve my disguise. I spend half my time trying to fool my party, and the other half sneaking my stilts on and off so I can move around the battlefield. I wouldn't even dream of trying to replicate a character like that in 4ed.

I'm a hater on 4ed.  I haven't played in a few years because of most of my pen and paper buddies getting married and having kids.  However we were still playing 2nd edition with some of our own house rules.  3ed was meh, never tried the Pathfinder stuff though.  I think if you don't want to spend an arm and a leg you are better off just tweaking your second edition game.  I still think its my favorite of the rule sets, but probably because I'm being nostalgic about it. 

Last time I looked at 4ed they had like 3 different DM guides and 3 different Players handbooks... let alone having to buy Monster Manuals, etc.

Meh, I don't really want to turn this into an edition war, but DMG, pg 42. 4e actually does handle improvised attacks and such, I don't know why people always ignore those rules in these discussions.

I have a character, a dwarf fighter, that I've been playing on and off since 1996  (2nd edition) in proudft's game. 4e is the first system that really has the character on the table actually match the one in my head, he can actually do all sorts of cool shit now. Yeah, I do have other characters who didn't translate as well, but that happened every edition change. I think what 4e did in particular for the non-spellcaster classes was great.

That said I guess we are drifting off topic a bit.

Also for the Pathfinder people, if you're not using it, this seems to be the go-to character software: http://www.wolflair.com/index.php?context=hero_lab

Their interface and license activation scheme is from like 1995, but it is very comprehensive otherwise. The group I'm playing PF with uses it and it is pretty nice to have.

Anyway you should just skip D&D and play Cyberpunk 2020 anyway!   :drill:

Hah.  One of my old friends from college e-mailed me recently on this.  I had a similar diatribe about 3rd Ed, and he said he finally got it after playing 4th.  (FWiW I enjoy 3rd Ed, it's just very different from 1st and 2nd.)

Morfiend will have to try it out for himself and see.

I guess I'll chime in with my love of Pathfinder over 4e.  We played a 4e campaign for close to a year, but no one ever really got into it very well, and it was pretty much falling apart due to lack of interest on the part of just about everyone.  We switched to a Pathfinder game, and now everyone's much more excited about game night. 

Besides all the stuff others have mentioned, Paizo's campaigns really are pretty well done.  I'm currently running their Kingmaker campaign, and the party's about to start building their own nation from the area they've spent the first few months exploring and pacifying.  Assuming things go well, by the end of the campaign path they should have a pretty impressive kingdom built up.  They also seem to try to change things up between their various campaign paths.  The one they just started publishing is supposed to be very horror-themed. 

I'll also echo the recommendation for Hero Builder from earlier in the thread.  I've been using it a lot with the current game. 

If you're set on wanting 4e, though, I'd definitely recommend taking a look at their D&D Insider/character builder setup.  I found it to be pretty useful for when we were playing the 4e campaign.  If you start getting outside of the first core books, though, you'll probably run into power-creep.  It was something we felt was becoming an issue towards the end of our 4e campaign, along with the cost of keeping up with all the supplements.  Miniatures were never an issue for us because we use MapTools for our games due to everyone being scattered around the world. 

I'm actually looking at converting Kingmaker to 4e, I think it will work very well.

Another nifty 4e tool btw: https://power2ool.com/login/

From what we've played of it so far, I'd say it'd be pretty worth the effort.  It's pretty sandboxish for a campaign path, and the kingdom building aspect really has the party psyched to play.  I'm honestly a bit jealous that I'm running it instead of playing.  

The exploration/kingdom building rules are pretty edition-independent too, that is nice.

:heart:


I wasn't a huge fan of 3e (although it did have some cool bits), and everything I hear about 4e makes me think I am not gonna like it at all. Good thing I have neither the time nor the disposable income the flush away on it.

I really would like to play my Warhammer 40k RPG book I bought a while ago, but of this new group im putting together, 2 of the 4 have never played pen and paper, and kind of want "to try dungeons and dragons".

As for me playing 2nd or 3rd Ed. The second edition books I had was a group collection, probably 40 books in all, and it was not mine to keep, so I passed it to the guy who took over DMing that group. Also, it seems that my roommate lent most of my 3rd ed books to a friend who was running a 3rd ed campaign.

I am pretty set on playing 4th edition for right now, as its something new for me to sink my teeth in to, and also its D&D. I might look in to that essentials stuff, as that would make it easer for my newbies.

Bunk, your special snowflake duelist? I have a character that does all that "move around the fight, control where people are, leaps over tables" shit. She's a 4th Edition charisma-based rogue. I assume the difference is I can't say I'm a monk 1/fighter 6/duelist 2, nor can I say she's underpowered but interesting. She's balanced and interesting instead.

Screw cpunk2020, Srun4e fo' life nigga!   :drill:



I hear great things about the new FantasyFlight rendition of Warhammer... y'know that uber-huge big box thing with the buncha bits.  And therein lies the key.  You get great lore, a 4e-like combat system, and lotsa shiny bits to play with at the same time.  I just wish someone would come out with an original IP that offered similar.

That's a Iron Soul Monk in 4ed.  :oh_i_see:




The difference in my mind, between 3rd (and its spin offs) and 4th edition, is 3rd edition is a simulator and 4th is a game.

3rd edition tried to make rules fit a pre-existing 'world', balance be damned. Fourth Edition has the fluff support the baseline mechanics.

3rd is fine for what it is, but I'm glad they moved into 4th, superior system in my mind.



http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/23/  :why_so_serious:

I would love to run either a Dark Heresy or Deathwatch game in addition to my 4E game, but I just don't have enough 40K fans in my group to pull it off.  *sigh*

She was a special snowflake damnit (until some asshole DM killed her *sniff*)

Seriously, don't get me wrong, I think 4th has a lot of merits, I just don't think it lends it self to "creative" players. Everything seemed balanced to the extreme. I don't want a super cool ability to fly 30" across the map, knock three guys down, trigger a healing surge, and make the third one pee his pants - once a day at the cost of me being able to activate one of my magic items all day - even in the middle of wide open plain. I want it to have to come up organically as part of the encounter, not be something I do automatically once a day.

I know what Ingmar is getting at with the pg 42 rules and such, and knowing you guys I have a feeling that Ingmar can make 4ed fun *despite itself*. Not every DM (not most) can do that.

I like to play gimmicky, kitchen sink characters. I like to try characters that don't "fit the mold" of character design - my duelist was essentially a fighter, who's second highest stat was Wisdom, and she had 10 str. I like to collect silly little, neer pointless magic items, and find uses for them. All of these things would essentially be penalized in 4ed. How many books in to 4ed were we before that Monk option you mentioned (sorry, Fordel mentioned) was printed btw? My Duelist was built entirely on the core book, with the exception of the One-Hander, which is essentially just a tweak from the first expansion hardcover they printed.

I'll stop, every time I do this it sounds like I'm trying to convince people to hate 4ed, which is not my intent. Rather, I just want people to know that if they liked aspects of 3.5, but felt it was bloated and broken, Pathfinder really is worth the look.

They got rid of the cap on daily item power activations, btw., which really was a pretty annoying rule. Actually that leads me into what is not exactly a complaint, but I do have kind of a love/hate relationshp with how the Insider/Compendium thing simultaneously is awesome because it lets them easily fix broken rules/powers but also sucks because the books get way more out of date than they used to.

And yeah PF really is a better 3.5 than 3.5 if that's what you want, I agree. Except for orcs, god I hate PF orcs.

Monks are in PHB3, the Iron Soul feature is from Psionic Power, though it isn't actually required to be the single weapon monk, it's just tailored to it.

Sjofn's suggestion of Artful Dodger Rogue is from PHB1, available right from the get go.

You could also just go with a plain old Fighter with a high dex score, little multiclassing into rogue or whatnot.





The point where I'll fight you Bunk (put up yer dukes  :why_so_serious: ), is in this idea that 4ed doesn't allow the same customization as previous editions. It's simply not true. It has all the weird gimmicky items and unusual character builds you could think of.

Like:
That's just a high bluff skill and a disguise kit, maybe toss in thievery for sleight of hand shenanigans. You could go Rogue with MC Ranger, or Ranger with MC Rogue, or Hybrid Ranger/Rogue. I see nothing at all preventing you from doing that character in 4e.

Yeah, my suggestion was from the very first PHB of 4th, although I'm not sure if some of the things that will make her awesome one day existed back then. I know my rogue's race didn't (she's a changeling ... so she has aspects of your goblin snowflake, in that she goes out of her way to present herself as a boring ol' human and she is the most epic liar I have ever played).

Point is, 4th actually is very flexible on the character building front, you just have to get over not having three classes listed as your "class." Hell, my rogue and Ingmar's rogue in another party could not possibly be more different. I control the battlefield by pushing and pulling and scurrying. Ingmar's controls it by murdering the fuck out of people. He's a str-based rogue and terrifying.  :ye_gods:



Don't know if INGMAR could make 4th Edition fun "in spite of itself" either ... proudft is our DM.  :grin:

Yeah I am not running a game at the moment, but I am getting the itch.

Or two weapon ranger, skipping the moves that require two weapons if you so choose, or declare your fist as an offhand weapon.  I don't even have a group to play D&D, but looking through the 4e PHB1 PDF I can find a way to accomplish more or less what Bunk wants with Fighter, Rogue, and Ranger.  Particularly if the DM does his damn job and lets you go batshit crazy with the improvised attacks.


It doesn't take much to extrapolate from the Monster Manual doppleganger, as long as your players don't throw a shitfit because it's not official Wizards of the Coast™ rules.  Then again, in my view that's half the point of having a DM.

Doppelganger and Changeling are the same thing now if I remember right.

Technically changelings are official, they're from Eberron.   :grin:

I need to whip up some 4th edition stats for dromites & vanara, though.

Yeah, my changeling is 100% actual intended player race. :why_so_serious:

I am utterly boring that way, though. I never played races that had level adjustments if I could help it during the 3 and 3.5 days either, too much of a pain.

I liked 4th edition enough. Played in 2 campaigns and DM'ed part of one. The social encounter nonsense sucked, but I'll futz with that in exchange for non-magic classes actually having neat things to do. The whole miniatures angle worked very well for me and my main group anyway as we've always been SRPG/TBS whores.

As far as improvised attacks...I always just made shit up and let people give it a shot if it seemed even somewhat plausible, such as minotaur characters charging through weak wooden walls after making a STR check. Or a player who wanted to use the Endurance skill in a social encounter to argue until the NPC just became flustered.

I really wish I had folks around here to play SOMETHING with, but alas... :oh_i_see:

Wait. What?

Lawl, that is gold.   I am remembering and using that.

Ingmar and proudft have been gaming buddies since roughly the dawn of time.

The stat bonuses and racial abilities for some of the less exotic monsters are present at the end of the Monster Manual, so for those it's possible to roll a standard level 1 character.  But you're letting proudft off too easy, next time you roll characters for a new campaign tell him you want to play as a Lamia, or something else equally bizarre.

EDIT: So long as that something else is a shapechanger that eats elves.
EDIT2: Or a mind flayer with a dwarven body. :awesome_for_real:
EDIT3: Or a night hag, but only if proudft is willing to do the "killing you in your dreams" part in full detail rather than it just being a standard power.


And they let you join them in their tree fort?

My initial assessment of 4th Ed was the same as Bunks, it was like WOW with dice.
Reading this thread and learning their are now 3 player's handbooks isn't helping to lessen that intial dislike.

2.5 was the best, all downhill from there.  Thac0, bitches. 

We ran a single FR campaign for nearly three years as a thieves' guild from Westgate, eventually causing world-wide destruction.  Our DM was amazing, as kids we always thought it had to be good vs. evil or humans vs. monsters, but he showed us how awesome it can be to do something else with the story.  I was a human dual class 10thief/16invoker when we ended it.  I think the dragon ended up winning that story, after three damn years. 

We always ran 1st ed. Too many rules just get in the way of the game.

That's kind of the reason I prefer storytelling systems. When you're gathered once a week for about 4 hours, and it takes 30m-2 hours to do one combat, the game ends up being shallow plot wrapped around a single end-of-the-evening encounter. Not a fan. If I wanted miniatures combat, I'd play a wargame. As I get older, I find storytelling even more interesting than whack-a-foozle. After all, that's what I play computer games for.

Combat is much faster in 4e.

Anyway. If you have a laptop (and a projector, or a TV that everyone can see and you can connect your laptop to)

I would suggest maptools instead of minis. www.rptools.net

With a little work you can take pretty much any encounter you want to make and put it into maptools.

Its easiest with online published adventures (rip the maps out of the PDF by taking a picture if your screen, scale it to 25 pixels/square, import and align the grid). Prep time for me was about 2-3 hours for a full published adventure which lasted 2-3 sessions.

For examples of what you can do, when I had the time I was running with an online group of friends, the first adventure path that WotC put up.

These won't let you run them without the materials. And they're for outdated versions of maptools (should still work). But it ought to give you an idea of what you can do which is pretty damned comprehensive.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=2688ee0762664e0eab1eab3e9fa335ca4bad1f63b54647b1

The biggest advantage of course is that if everyone makes their own macros you can automate rolling really really fast. The only thing that slowed our games down was a lack of mics. Other than that, if we went over 30 minutes a combat it was a quite long one.

I'm skeptical of 4th for this reason, but am curious to try it sometime and see how combat actually plays.  From reading the rulebooks it certainly feels like it's heavily inspired by WoW / modern MMORPGs, but at also seems like it might lead toward relatively fast paced and not terribly tedious combat, which would allow for a bit more focus on roleplaying and a bit less on fiddly details of combat simulation, which might not be bad.

4e Monster Manual II is terrible.  I downloaded a scan and I still feel cheated.

Screw Thac0, it was needlessly complex.  BAB is perfectly fine.

Made some pretty damn broken characters in 3.5e.

And I wouldn't say 4e is like WoW - I'd compare it more with SRPG/TBS.

Different strokes and such, though this thread is really making me crave some table top. Too bad my imminent move makes trying to join an in-person group kind of pointless. :oh_i_see:

I laughed.

If it's like any game (and they admittedly drew on lots for inspiration and ideas), I'd put it closest to Final Fantasy Tactics.

These are matters of dire import.

You can still get away with that, but you really do need a grid of some kind.  I have a grid that you can write on with wet-erase pens that I use for just this purpose., but it does help to have 1 mini for each player.  There is no reason you can't use generic tokens though.    I guess my point is you don't really need to invest heavily in minis to play 4th.  It is however super combat focused (which is does pretty well, flows a lot better, much less an hour per round stuff like I'd sometimes see in large groups in 3rd)

Instead of mini's I just bought a 3/4" dowel  and cut off small slices and pasted pictures of tokens onto them.  For larger creatures I'd have to spend more time.  I did this mainly because I wanted to give 4e a fair shot, though I still prefer 2nd Ed. since that was the system I first played.  I really like the 4e combat, but it takes too long in my opinion.

Oh I found a couple shots of my tiles on my comp:  Yeah, I'm anal retentive when I decide to do a project
spoilerd for size.  It's a hasty set up I called The Cathedral and most of the tiles haven't been textured yet at this point but you get the idea.

So (most) of our group leveled last night (level 4, whoo!) and while updating my stats, I realized I hadn't been doing that for the past 2 levels.  Duh!  That goes right along with forgetting to give myself level 2 cleric spells when I reached level 3.  /facepalm

Anyways, our group is currently playing 3e and it's been fun.  Some of the debates about rules and techniques really makes you wonder why they exist though, like flanking.  If you have an opponent in flank and another PC comes up and stands next to one of the flanking PCs, it -is- a bit silly that the new PC doesn't get flank bonuses as well.

And our DM kept throwing mobs of goblins backed by trolls at us.  After the party was out of spells and seriously down on HP.  And then after we managed to survive that encounter, we tried to rest and ended up having to run, then found a way out from under the mountain we were in, only to run into.... goblins and trolls.  It's amazing we only lost 1 party member.

To stay marginally on topic - while I think Bzalthek's setup is a bit crazy, it would be kind of fun to have that kind of terrain to play on.  I rather like using minis for the games.  Sure, you might not need them, but it sure makes it more fun and then you can have the debates about which square/hex your char was really in.

Yeah, that setup was intentionally crazy.  I wanted to use every tile as a showcase.  Most adventures only used a few large tiles and some additional smaller ones connecting them.

Anyone else like "Castles and Crusades"?  It's DND 2nd ed, cleaned up with BAB instead of THACO.  It's very easy to learn and play and feels like DND more than even 3e.  (Full disclosure:  I started playing DND with 1st edition)

4e (The Dark Ages) is OK, especially if you like very visual combats, but it's not DND.  Our group just couldn't embrace it. 
3.5 (The Bronze Age) is great as long as you're not the GM.  Prep times are long and the game seems to mudflate after level 10 or so.
2e (The Silver Age) was the mainstay for our group for years.
1e was the Golden Age as we did the bidding of Ferroman, the blacksmith who was more than he seemed.  First and greatest DM I ever had.  EPIC.

That setup is seriously awesome.   

As I said earlier, I just do a lot of printouts on cardstock and taping them together prior to the game session. 

I'll add a few props here and there for 3D emphasis, but nothing like the awesome multi-level 3d creations I've seen floated around here and there.

(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_R85dKVRG87Y/TaIO1rVe-ZI/AAAAAAAAFDs/gdqkGRCGV8g/s800/siege.jpg)

Life makes me trying to join a table top group these days kind of pointless.
I can already hear the wife,"You wanted to spend 5 hours on a Saturday within someone other than meeeeeeeee!?!  :drillf:"

4e is so combat focused that you will spend less time in combat than in any other DnD system. Frankly I don't understand the complaints. Not only does adherence to details in combat with little adherence to details in other aspects of the game seem ideal for DnD given that you're most likely to have differences about combat, combat is most likely to take up a disproportionate amount of time compared to what it should, and rules for non-combat are the most often complained about, the most often house ruled, and most often ignored.

I mean, was anyone really made better off by the rules about how to make chairs in 3.5? Did we really need so many skills and so many ways to organize them (that no one used, since everyone pretty much just put the full ranks into some set number of skills anyway?)


4e is not like WoW in any sense of the word, unless you think that any game is like WoW. The rules are, in fact, much more like a tabletop wargame, modified to fit the tropes of RPG's. We could think of this like an SRPG, but SRPG's don't tend to focus on movement and placement nearly as much as 4e does so i don't think the comparison is apt.

Also, seriously give maptools a chance. Its great for roleplaying and 4e in general

Just 5 hours?  Lightweight!     :drill:

Fack, someone needs to come up with a decent way to do this shit online with Skype or something - I'm jonesing as I look at my nerd bag in my closet, which I know contain my books and dice!  :cry:

Nostalgia. We are old.


D&D never used the term "tank" to my knowledge until 4thed was released after WoW. Add in all the new fruity special races tiefling (ie night elves), dragon born, etc.
And you can at least see that they purposefully made and marketed 4thed with an eye to the MMO fan and market.
Which upset nostalgic traditionalists (ie old farts) such as myself. :grin:

Or a "tank" is just a catch-all for the guy who is best at taking a beating. :oh_i_see:

I don't know when and who first used the term "tank" to describe somebody with low AC but certainly by the early 80's it was a pretty common term among those who played RPGs. There's even a picture of a literal tank representing AC -10 in the Wizardry I manual.

There's nothing to really "get" about why some people prefer one game system over another...they just do.  Which unfortunately means you'll really have to try any given version to see whether it works for you personally.

I started with AD&D back in the 80s, and there's still things I like about it, warts and all.  Particularly the multitude of ways to horribly murder your party (it's always seemed silly to me that in 3.5, it's hard to kill someone with poison.)  There's times the group geezers wish we could get "nostalgia night" going and run some 1st edition, but it's probably too hard to retrain the younger players into it.

2nd edition I never played, outside of the computerized stuff like Baldur's Gate, but some of the players grew up on it and they have fond memories of it.

My current group started 3.5e 4-5 years ago.  We started off with one fellow DMing a single campaign, but he's bipolar and his campaign eventually fell apart during one of his harder emotional crashes.  We wound up doing a round-robin sort of campaign at that point--a home city, everyone with one character, and we'd take turns DMing short games for two or three weeks within that setting, depending on who had an idea.  If you've ever read the "Thieve's World" series, you'll have a good idea how it went.  This way, everyone got to play and nobody had to spend an inordinate amount of time doing DM prep.

After a little practice, though, I switched over to DM and I've been running the game for about the last year & a half.  By this point, I only had to spend the time setting up a little campaign world background, a few house rules to fit the scenario, and start everyone at level 1 with enough plot material to go a few weeks.  Once that initial period was over and the characters' personalities & styles had developed, I dont' think I've had to spend more than about half an hour every week planning things.  It all grows out of their actions.  The only exception is when I want to include a plot villain that the munchkins can't murder outright in 3 rounds...that takes some planning.

When 4th edition hit most of the players hated it.  We've got one guy who loves it, and he's also now playing in another group that does 4e.  I'm indifferent to it;  I can see how it would be fun, but I'm not sinking a bunch of money into it if the rest of the group isn't going along (I don't have time for a second D&D session each week).

We're probably going to be transitioning into Pathfinder; several of the players are familiar with it, one person is comfortable enough with it to DM, it's close enough to 3.5 the rest can pick it up pretty quick, and everyone's got pdfs of the materials.

It doesn't use the term "tank" now either.

That's pretty much why I stick with L5R or Feng Shui. *shrugs*

My apologies. Striker, Defender, Leader, Controller.
Same difference.

I dont remember anyone in our games (70's thru 90's) tanking or trying to hold agro. Maybe others used that term and play style but I never saw that until the advent of MMO's. YMMV.

4E was SUPPOSED to have a virtual table top, part of the DnD insider subscription service. It theoretically, might still get one, maybe, there's apparently something in Beta now.  :why_so_serious:

If you're like us, "tanking" was generally fighters in the front or back of the party so that they'd be the first to run into the enemy (or fall into the pit of sharpened stakes, etc), or keep them from sneaking up behind you.   Also blocking access to the squishier types in the middle.  Stuff you can't do in an MMO that doesn't allow collisions.

And this is all 4e does really, it gives those characters ways to disicentivize monsters from going after other characters, there's no taunting or aggro in the sense of an MMO. It really isn't the same thing. Every edition has let fighters hit someone who tries to walk away from them after all.

I started playing 2e in the 90s; switched to 3.0 when it came out and liked it a lot once I got used to it. Now I run a game of 3.5, and don't plan on switching any time soon. 4e just rubbed me the wrong way (samey classes, MMO bullshit), plus I already have $300+ in books (this wasn't the case with 2e since I was young and only had PHB, DMB, MM). I might check out Pathfinder if we ever get bored, though.

I remember referring to them as "meat shields".  Worked better with a DM that used miniatures for battles.

--Dave

4th edition is a very, very well designed game. It's also actually balanced, in terms of giving every member of the party an equally challenging and rewarding role, and the classes are actually roughly balanced, in comparison to its predecessors' complete imbalance and the comparative uselessness of many classes beyond level 8.

If it's not for you, it's not for you. But, mechanically, it's an entirely superior game to 3e in most every conceivable way. And, if you liked the way your 3e games were run, you can actually run 4e games in much the same way. It's pretty easy to work out. but ... seriously, 4e combat with maptools is a sight.

sad you have to hack the cb though.

Oh shit! Let's argue whether or not 4e is like WoW because THAT HAS NEVER EVER FUCKING BEEN DONE BEFORE EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE INTERNET.

Okay so D&D 4e has some similarities to WoW because THE FUCKING DEVELOPERS ADMITTED THEY DREW INSPIRATION FROM IT. Same with how it has similarities to Final Fantasy Tactics, Magic the Gathering, AND GODDAMN CHESS. Anyone who says otherwise just wants to pick an Internet tardslap fight and drag on a forum thread for nineteen pages about whose D&D system is better and how you're WRONG for playing something other than what they're playing.

If only there was a 3.5 system still around and supported for people to play that. OH WAIT!!!!!

Anyone who read their blogs while they were developing 4e would know all this. If you didn't read them religiously while it was in development then you're clearly not a serious about D&D. DILETTANTES!

(Disclaimer: I am currently involved in a Pathfinder game, a 3.5 game, and two 4e games.)

Is anybody manufacturing display/tables similar to the Microsoft Surface demo but for somewhat sane prices?

I think a fusion of computer assisted and miniature based tabletop gaming could be pretty slick.

Balance is overrated. 2e 4 life!

You can always play Hackmaster. I got it cheap at a con, and while it's impressive to read, I can't see anyone in the world being able to...master it outside of a comic book super hero.

Who needs fireballs when you can throw darts?

There are DIY articles online for how you can fabricate your own.  Essentially you're taking old "broken" LCD TVs and using them as a gametable.  You can pick em up for free from recycling centers, random garage sales, or ebay even (though shipping is lawl).

The other type is overhead projection, wherein you mount a projector onto your ceiling facing downward.  Even fancier, you can integrate markers onto objects to add some augmented reality to it.. i.e. put markers on your fingers so you can manipulate the gametable, objects, etc.   I had a system I was devising that would basically be small cubes or chits with IR-markers on them that'd transorm into player characters; this way players would still have to physically move something as they would a mini, rather than pointing and clicking.

I've seen custom fabricators for both these types but forgive me for not having a link.  It's buried in my other rig right now and I'm moving.

Well, this went about as well as expected. Slyfeind - take a breath, come off the ledge man, it's not worth it.

I am aware of the fact that they have changed and updated a *lot* since I tried 4th. Most of what I have heard was changed tends to justify my original criticisms, so I'm glad to hear they were willing to adjust.


That really sums it all up.

I like all the talk about different formats for laying out the game. For me personally, it's not the same without minis (the idea of 2d chits seems just wrong). We currently play on a home made table, where the host took a 3x5 sheet, covered the entire thing with 1" graph paper, and then ironed on a layer of MatTack. Then added a lip so it fits nicely over his old kitchen table. Essentially made it in to one big erasable map. We used to use the roll up erasbale maps, but they never tended to big big enough.

Didn't we used to have an F13 D&D game running a few years back, or am I confusing it with something else?  I vaguely remember having a special subforum for it or something.

Yeah, I was running a CoC game over IRC until it became impossible to get everyone online at the same time.   :cthulu:

I've never heard of an online game really working. I kind of doubt WotC's virtual table (which is in closed beta right now) is going to improve the success rate.

Whew, I feel much better now. ^_^


Chits are boring little discs. With minis, it becomes ThreeDee! Then you can make trees and roads and mountains and little paper buildings and boats. This is us on a frozen lake with FROZEN WAVES!!!

I'm playing in a couple of games on a forum.  The pace is slower, but it works pretty well up until the GM gets a life.  Players are a little easier to deal with if they disappear for a week or two.

Well right, they seem to get much more easily derailed by that sort of thing it seems to me. Maybe I'm wrong and it is just down to the technology - after all some MMO guilds keep weekly raid groups together for years. I think, though, there's something about the online format that makes people just feel better about ducking out of it, or maybe the fact that it is an online event rather than an in-person one pushes it farther down the list for people in terms of social importance. "Oh, I can just schedule over this, it is just the internet game."

That's one of the nice things about playing an asynchronous game (like forum games or play by e-mail games).  Getting ten people to log into MSN Messenger at 10:00 PM is a lot tougher than getting ten people to reply to a forum post or e-mail sometime in the next few days.

Though it does drop a lot of the social aspect to the game, in my experience.

CB?

I never had to hack anything to make it work


Maptools from www.rptools.net

Seriously. Its better than anything that WotC will ever hope to make and its free.

That being said. I have DM'd a weekly online game for about 9 months. And played in one that went about a 2 years (for me, started around level 7, retired the characters at level 30 after beating the big baddie). Both were 4e.



Edit: link fixed. Hell, i linked it earlier in this thread correctly

Link goes to a domain squatter, I assume you mean http://rptools.net/

"Sure, why wouldn't they?" she asked days later.

It's not like I'm not a giant dork myself. It's part of how I won my way into Ingmar's nerd heart.  :oh_i_see:

I ran online game of 3.5 for about a year and a half using openRpg. It avoided the vagueness of a chat room thanks to the 'virtual tavletop'.

I never 'get' these online paper-RPG games.  If I wanted to play a game on the computer, I'd play a computer game, is how I've always felt.  It seems so slow and clunky and impersonal.

I think I would miss the actual physical act of rolling dice too much.

Aren't you neck deep in BloodBowl?

Blood Bowl is two people and has no actual social interaction.

You obviously don't understand the sanctity of the tree fort.


Not really?  Tiefling is 2e, and the obvious parallel is Dranei in WoW.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7c/TSR2600_Planescape_Campaign_Setting.jpg/250px-TSR2600_Planescape_Campaign_Setting.jpg)

Man, now I want to play 2e. 4th never quite got the Planes right. They're all weird and dumb now, with the elemental chaos and the astral sea.

It's not that bad.

Three prime planes that reflect each other, one chaos plane, one lawful plane, the Far Realm, and Sigil.  The nine hells are still the nine hells, the Abyss is still the abyss, and demons and devils still don't really get along.  It's slightly better than needing a goddamn 3D diagram to figure out what the hell a negative material plane is.

I was not a fan of the names either, so I just sort of mapped them to the old ones, and consider the new names synonyms, perhaps from other parts of the world or whatever.

So the main planes become:

Ethereal Plane->Feywild
Limbo->Sea of Chaos
Plane of Shadow->Shadowfell
Astral Plane->Astral Sea

And all the random outer planes I wanted to keep (which was not all of them, I had already jettisoned several years ago) connect off whichever of the four main planes seems most appropriate.  So, yeah, the connections & arrangements are slightly different now, but it's not as totally world-shifting as I originally thought when 4E came out.  

Besides, who says that other planes always keep the same arrangement for eternity, anyway?   :grin:   And making the Ethereal Plane the Feywild gives that place some flavor, finally.

It annoys me more due to the naming of (some of) the planes than due to the actual setup of it. 4e in general has way too much portmanteau naming. I kind of feel like Plane of Shadow was a fine name, calling it the SHADOWFELL is just fishing for something you can call your IP imo.

I only kept track of Eberron's cosmology either way, so it isn't a huge deal to me.

For the last time, I am not bringing back the Happy Hunting Grounds.

 :cry:

So just take the way the planes are in 2e and port it over into 4th? Its not like 4th edition actually has any set rules for what the planes are

The Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos are obviously analogous to the Outer planes of earlier versions, one being lawful, the other being chaotic, and most of the inner planes having been merged into the Chaotic planes because the Inner Planes were a stupid idea anyways.

The Feywild and Shadowfell are genitive and entropic versions of the Prime Material Plane.

Um, yes? What in my quoted section were you actually replying to.  :-P

It's not quite just a GRIMDARK version of the Negative Energy Plane.  There is a difference: it contains things.

That would make more sense if I had actually compared it to the Negative Material Plane (hint: the old Plane of Shadow is not the same thing.)

NERD FIGHT.

This is the one topic I will go full WUA on.

Good idear! :) Now I just have to convince my DM of that....

I don't like any of the renaming either. Even back in 2e, "Outlands" made me wince at first. It was too cyberpunk (which is kinda what they were going for really).

Wasn't the Plane of Shadow a demiplane that was connected to the Ethereal Plane separately from the elemental planes?

Pre-3e, yes. In 3e it graduated to a coterminous plane with the Prime.

I also though I had proudft's little decoder ring in there when I originally typed it up, which makes the Feywild the Ethereal Plane, which isn't really the same thing as the HAPPYLIGHT, unless my memory is not serving me right.  Apparently I didn't, I blame the back and forward buttons on my new mouse, they make it too easy to lose posts, rendering what does get through as gibberish.

Yeah, the Feywild->Ethereal equivalency is wholly pulled out of my ass to make me happy with the current setup.   But the Ethereal was always sort-of connected to the Prime what with ghosts, passing through walls, and the shallow ethereal vs. deep ethereal or whatever they hell those were called in the original MoP.  So it works for me.

I always consider the 2E Planescape box to be the canonical D&D cosmology.  I thought the 3E treatment lacked soul (even though I generally prefer 3E as a game system) and I haven't even looked at the 4E version because I know it'll make me nerdrage.

Yeah I can understand that. Promoting the shadow plane was one thing I feel 3e got right, though. In 4e they also kind of crammed Hades/Grey Wastes and (sort of) Ravenloft in there too, and populated it with humans-with-piercings-and-bad-attitudes (which used the same name as a more interesting 3e shadow fey race sadly) and I think it kind of lost something in the translation.

Also a lot easier to come up with scenarios where you'd end up in another planes and not be immediately dead.

"Easier on the head" is not a good feature when talking about fictional extradimensional realities IMO.   :why_so_serious:

Except it provably is.  Dungeons & Dragons does not contain a primer on string theory.

That isn't his point. His point is that it isn't supposed to make much sense, the more convoluted and confusing it is the more it makes sense.

It is supposed to kinda feel like Geocentrism and the associated built models that were actually consistent with the movements of the solar system E.G. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1550_SACROBOSCO_Tractatus_de_Sphaera_-_%2816%29_Ex_Libris_rare_-_Mario_Taddei_.JPG)

In fact, if you go here (http://cosmology.net/BigBang.html) and look about half way down of the first article and ignore the rest of the crazy, there are some seriously great models of the Ptolemaic system that were created as the ability to see that things were wrong got so much better

The same thing happened with the "Humors" (Medieval medicine was as scientific as current medicine, even including demonic possession) at some point looking into the body became good enough we could tell that the old way was wrong and abandoned it.

This is kinda what its supposed to feel like, the budding observations of possibly crazy alchemists and wizards ever probing into a strange ebbing and flowing cosmos.  Generating ever more complicated models on top of theories of how it all fits together. The prescriptions you get from the most recent idea probably works, but won't ever really make sense, because the model is so complicated you would have to study your entire life to make sense of it.

Except more convoluted, confusing, and arcane would lead one to... string theory.

Out of the darkness leaps 1d6 Schrodinger's Cats (Small Undead(?) Beast).

EDIT: If they had wanted the heliocentric model with epicycles, just for the sake of obtuseness, they would have used it.  Really, their cosmology is "where would we like to fight" with the unifying bits tossed in to make it not totally schizophrenic and seemingly out of place.

GET YO PHYSICS OUTTA MY DEE AND DEE!

(http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Spelljammer_4016_2701.jpg)

IT'S MAGIC HERE!

I havent read the 4e FR campaign setting but from looking stuff up due to references to Shadowfell in the new Salvatore books, didnt the Plane of Shadows collapse or turn into or something the Shadowfell during the Spell Plaque or Time of Troubles in FR?

So what happened to all the elemental planes?

And even though Im an old schooler, I never got or understood the Ethereal Plane in the early campaign settings. We ignored it.

I always considered Deities and Demigods to be the canon. I dont think I ever bought the Planescape box.

Never used the planes really. Old campaigns in AD&D were low-magic, because we were young and magic just complicated things. It just never came up in 3e or 4e.

The basic ideas were the same. Planescape just put cities and factions into the mess.

Man. Gonna go looking for Planescape on eBay and Amazon now....

We only really ever used the elemental and aligned planes (Abyss, hells, heavens, etc.), and never bothered with any astral travel nonsense via the astral plane; we just used the plane shift spell.

If I remember correctly, the Githyanki are Astral Plane denizens.  I remember our party having to face invasions from them, and backtracking through astral mazes and other Prime worlds they invaded until we reached their home.  One of my favorite campaigns, actually.

/hugs her Planescape box set...

I rather liked the Planescape setting and it was the only campaign I actually ran for my old gaming group.  I loved the cant they used for the residents and the different factions because it added that whole political aspect to the game rather then just plain "good guys go fight ugly monsters" which is the usual D&D flavor.

I've tried it a bit. The only purpose I can see for it is that if you are absolutely dead set on playing "tabletop" with a group of people that now lives far apart.  To me, the idea of being able to get 5 of my old friends together to play "pen and paper" online once a week would be a lot of fun, but it isn't the same if we say, played WoW together.  If you have a group available to play with that meets in person regularly and you are happy with it, online pen and paper seems pretty much useless.

1st Edition Manual of the Planes is my definitive cosmology.  Planescape didn't really change much, and what it added was great.  There really aren't that many changes with 3rd Ed either.  There weren't wholesale shifts as with 4th.  (Demons are now elementals, what?)

All the planar diagrams are fantasy human understanding applied to a metaphysical concept though.  The 'reality' can be as complex and bizarre as a DM wants, and conflicting views can all be correct.  That's part of the fun of the planes.

Anyone fooled with a Spelljammer 4e conversion?  I thought about tackling it, but seriously... who has the time for this shit?
My 1st 4e campaign was essentially going to be spelljammer-esque.  Planar in nature via playable skyship travel, complete with interdimensional phlogiston politics.  The ships themselves of course would be living entities that the players could play or use as a controllable minion imprinted onto a particular player.

The more I grok it the more I realize it's probably just easier to Freestyle the whole thing with an assload of randomizers, rather than try to forcefeed some existing IP.

My old group used strictly 1st edition stuff (I still have all of the books like the players handbook, Unearthed Arcana), they must be from the early 80's.  I never really got the attraction of the later editions (especially the move to miniatures), but that is the crotchedy-old nerd gamer in me I guess.  :grin:

First edition is the best. I still get together and play three or four times a year with the same group I started playing with in 1978 back in university.

"1st edition" is not even the original Arnesonian model for D&D, it's the quasi-Gygaxian version.  If you want TRUE original (crotchety old-gamer) D&D you'll have to sift around for some old play reports and/or DL "Dragons at Dawn."   And any Gygax influenced D&D is always going to defer to using minis, since the whole point of his system from the get-go was fantasy wargaming from the "1st person" perspective.

To that end, 4e is actually more a testament to the original Gygaxian D&D than anything else.  i.e. an even tighter, more refined AD&D.  Anything in between has been the real departure from the "norm."

As for those folks still playing 1st ed.  That's fine, but imo there are better systems out there that do what it intended much better and are more supported.  Those people play the white box out of nostalgia more than any other reason.  (shrug)  Or it really just has to do with what you're comfortable with.

By-the-book First Edition combat is pretty awful.  For reference: http://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=FE&fileid=263&watchfile=0

It's full of contradictions, doesn't work well with minis, and is generally an awful mess.  We gave it a try last year just for the hell of it, when I realized, hey we never really used the rules as written back in high school and earlier.   I'm still not sure where our 'rules' back then came from.  Group osmosis, I guess. 

It's funny, though, that everyone everywhere sort of settled on the same Basic/1st edition mishmash that jettisoned much of the AD&D awfulness.  But stuff like interrupting spells and how you move your minis are things that every group basically had to invent for themselves, since the rules are virtually useless.

I am not entirely happy with the speed of 4th edition combat, but two things are improving that.  One is the realization that a lot of the speed is up to the DM and what one puts in the encounters.   Making a far heavier use of minions speeds things up tremendously, for example.  I seem to have settled in on a max of about eight combats per game session, so now that I know that, I can pace things to fit it.  Secondly, as time has passed, WOTC has started lowering monster hp and increasing their damage, which helps a fair bit (and, I suppose, proves it wasn't just me).

There is, though, still some charm to the 'ha ha you surprised the orcs, charge, roll 4 hits, they die, woo the party won'.  But the flip side of that is 'you open the door and (roll initiative) the dragon wins initiative, he breathes, who survives... whoops no one'.  Which I had happen once.   :facepalm:

1st edition != white box. In old crank gamer speak, the white box (plus supplements) is usually called OD&D. 1st edition refers to the first edition of AD&D - the players handbook/DMG/monster manual etc. To be complete, the Moldvay D&D (basic set/expert set/etc) is usually called BECMI.
 :why_so_serious:

1st edition grappling rules ftw!

Oh man, I'd forgotten how ridiculously complicated (and awesome) psionic combat was in AD&D.   :drill:

Hell yes. When I was in high school myself and some friends used to sit around smoking pot and drinking beer and playing "pit fighting" where we basically rolled up throw away characters and had them pit fight using the grappling rules. Was really fun.

I believe, when referring to AD&D, that is the first time in history those words have appeared in that order.

Yea, MM3 is when that conversion started. The monster vaults all follow the same scheme to the best of my knowledge. The primary motivator was that the monsters just couldn't actually hurt PCs for the most part is my understanding.

The image of a group of angels and a group of demons drinking at a bar in Sigil, glaring at each other over their drinks, amuses me to no end.

I don't have a hate-on for 4th, but I think it's the weakest version of D&D so far.
Too many fiddly situations to track. (Poisoned, save ends. Stunned until the end of the monster's next turn, Restrained until the end of your next turn... gah) And everything is balanced to the point of homogenization.

I do like using minis though. I never used them in Basic/1st/2nd edition, and it's kinda fun after giving it a shot.

The abilities in 4e are meant to be written down on cards.

I like it better than counting rounds, personally. Either you have it or you don't. Conditions are perhaps a bit too ubiquitous though, it is true.

This is really my biggest problem with 4th.  I feel like there is a lot less room for character building.  Building quirky characters brings me a huge amount of enjoyment, and its just a weak point for 4th.

What the fuck does this even mean? People keep saying stuff like this and I keep not understanding what the shit they are referring to.



Things are only unique if they are underpowered or overpowered?

One of the best things I ever did for my campaign (pre MM3)  was to drop monster HP by about 30% and increase their damage output by about 30%.   Combat moves a hell of a lot faster and PCs are forced to be a lot smarter about their tactics.

I'm torn here a lot.   As a GM, I love bringing cool props and bits into play.  Having a box full of status markers makes me happy.   That said, actually using said markers in combat can be a serious pain in the ass and tracking it all is a bit of :effort:

Just as an example, and I don't have the books in front of me, but a lot of mage spells have been eliminated or severely scaled back due to being theoretically "overpowered". In fact, being a mage is pretty much just straight damage or confusion in 4e. There's no more misdirection, no more illusion, no more 10 minute invisibility, stuff like that. They got rid of a lot of the more "interesting" spells. Nearly all of them revolve around combat, whereas a majority of spells in the previous versions revolved around pre-combat information gathering, planning, creating favorable conditions for combat to take place in. Basically, what makes a mage "strong" in fantasy situations - planning.

And to top it off, they made magic missile require a roll to hit. I will never, ever forgive them for that.

I did really cheesy things with a Wand of Magic Missile before my DM started making me roll to-hit for it.

"The evil king begins to read from the Necronomicon, summoning the powers that will destroy the world."

"I fire a magic missile at the book."

"Dave's character is now paralyzed and incapable of participating in the rest of this encounter."

--Dave

Except all of that stuff is still there? It's either still an actual wizard combat power, or it's a ritual. Rituals are specifically all those spells that you used before combat situations to reward planning.


They also changed magic missile to not require a hit roll.  :why_so_serious:



-fake edit- Like http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/invisibility.htm , that is still a Wizard power, PHB1 level 6 daily power. (Page 162  :oh_i_see:   :why_so_serious:)

I guess all that stuff is in the supplements. I bought the 4e PHB when it came out and haven't really touched it since.

When did they change magic missile? ALL IS FORGIVEN

I think it (magic missle) was with 'Essentials', but I have no idea on like a exact date. Might've been before that.


There are some rituals in PHB1 2 and 3, but yea they are really spread out across books and dragon/dungeon articles. That is certainly one of those things where their online compendium thing is "required" if you really want them all.



If anything there is even MORE weird and quirky shit in 4e, because Dungeon and Dragon are all legit options now, part of the core rules and shit. 

The classes are far less unique, and much more defined by their "role" than their class.  Bring a tank, some strikers, a healer, and have at it.  A controller if someone really really like utility spells.   It doesn't really matter if your tank is a warrior or a paladin or if you bring a rogue or a warlock or a ranger, or which healer.  I mean, there are some slight variations, but I just feel like most of what made the game interesting in terms of class selection and unique character building has been ditched in favor of making pretty much any group combination viable.  

I think of it less as generally underpowered or overpowered, and more about specifics.  I'd often build characters who were super great in some situations, but ended up needing to be really creative with game mechanics to be useful in others.   In otherwords, I'd be good for 1 or 2 "that was fucking awesome" moments a week, and other times I could be a hamstrung.  It also added the depth of trying to get into situations where your characters could excel.   

I miss my 3rd edition monk builds :(

None of my 4th edition characters are the ones I'll be talking about in 5 years, you know?  I have friends from high school that when I see them we'll still bring up "Hey, remember that crazy Samurai build so and so did in our oriental adventures campaign!"  In 4th edition its kind of..remember that Warrior build - yeah of course you do, because its EVERY warrior build.

This is also, not true at all.

Unless "slight variations" means completely different play-styles and approaches to combat, group composition and tactics.


-edit-

All of that shit, still exists. All of it.

You can be a generalist, you can hyperfocus, you can be a cardboard cutout of a cliche or you can be an off the wall, out of the box, basket case.

None of that is remotely gone.

Y'all keep saying that, but the PHB and DMG I have don't show it.  If it's true because of all the later supplements then they messed up, because it's too late as far as myself and many others are concerned.

Agreed, I did buy PHB 2, but thats where it ended for me.   As for these quirky builds, I've just literally not seen any in the games I played.  I havent played 4th extensively, I'll freely admit, but given the ruleset, I don't see the inherent complexity of the extremely open ended feats/skills system of 3rd edition being replicated in 4th.  If there are ways to do it, I'd love to know.

Which snowflake would you like me to build for you?


Give me a character concept that you seemingly can't make in 4e.

I have to go with Fordel here. Again, I will gesture to my rogue versus Ingmar's rogue (our rogues are in different parties). We're both rogues, we both roll sneak attack dice. And the similarity pretty much ends there. His rogue is an absolute bruiser that can kill the shit out of things really fast because he does a fuckton of damage. I can do some nice damage on my rogue too, but not nearly as much as him. On the other hand, my rogue will be excellent at controlling the battlefield. She's built to push people all over the damn place, to run all over the place herself, to put enemies places they don't want to be, to give her party combat advantage, etc. In any social situations, my rogue would walk all over his, too. Hell, our stat emphasis is even a little different, he's a str/dex rogue and I'm a dex/cha rogue.


You can be a special snowflake in 4E. It's a little harder to make a shitty special snowflake, because the game is balanced better, but I don't see how that is bad at all.

Also I find the "well my PHB and DMG don't show that!" understandable, but a little silly, given I am pretty damn sure my 3rd edition PHB wasn't going to blow away anyone all on its own either. I guess what I think is you should maybe trust the people who have played 4E a lot (or complete weirdos like Fordel who just like to build characters all day) that the flexibility is indeed there now. I played a looooot of 3rd edition. I was a little "meh" about 4th at first myself, because it did seem less flexible (although I was glad they stabbed the whole wizards-suck-then-are-completely-broken thing to death). Then I played it for a while and more books got published. Now I think it's more flexible, because you can do some weird shit but it will WORK and not be shitty in all situations except one Really Special One.

Some of my favorite builds from 3rd:

1) Jump Monk: Keep jump maxed out as well as climb, boots of spring and striding when possible.  Bounce around the battlefield, lots of vertical combat with jump and climb, dropping on enemies to grapple and pin (especially fun in pathfinder).

2) Diplomo-Bard:  Very little focus on combat, high charisma and diplomacy skills, taking Leadership ASAP.  Support spells and lots skill use in combat (intimidate, for example) to aid team mates without doing much actual fighting.  Absolutely shines in non-combat based encounters and free form RP with skill checks.  Not TOO unique here, just LOTS of skill use.

3) Spiked Chain Trip warrior - this is probably fairly straight forward in 4th.   Warrior who uses his extra feats to get improved trip early and keep enemies on the ground.  Also good for groups that like to interrogate enemies because it increases your ability to capture enemies.  At higher level you end up taking a lot of the feats that give you quirky/situational in combat abilities that make you awesome at controlling the battlefield, but not a particualrly high damage dealer. 

Its late and I'm going to bed, but those are just 3 of my old characters that I loved a lot off the top of my head.  I think its probably obvious from my concepts that I like avoiding direct combat, being support, and using sometimes less used game mechanics as central to my character concepts.

Exactly. Previous versions of D&D felt like they encouraged crazy plans and dumb ideas. 4th is all about doing 2[w] damage and shifting 3 squares on the grid. Sly was pretty right, I think, in comparing it to Final Fantasy Tactics.
It's possible to think outside the box, but I don't feel that 4th encourages it very much.

I think the term we're looking for, in terms of balance, is "zero sum".

But it's more than that. D&D has always been zero sum, to one degree or another. But what 4e does is make combat zero sum on its own. 1e, by contrast, brought trap detection, magic items, saving throws, and experience tables into the mix. 1e was also zero sum, but it was often hard to see that kind of balance, because of the interpretation of it all.

In 1e, a party of two fighters and two clerics was not very viable...unless they were in an adventure that was only about fighting and healing and blessing. In 4e, that would be viable in just about any circumstance, with rules as written. In 1e, a party of three thieves would be completely inept...unless they were in an adventure that was all about stealth, traps, locks, and stealing. In 4e, they'd be totally fine; again, with rules as written.

Rules as written in 1e, though, ranged from dungeon-delving to swimming in seas of lava to Alice in Wonderland to wandering around in fucking spaceships. Rules as written in 4e is a series of combats interspersed with skill challenges. You could go against that if you want, but you're not playing 4e. You're doing something different with the 4e rules.

Oh so as long as you buy all 3 PHB's then its just like it used to be! Goctha.  :why_so_serious:
 :uhrr:

1) That's a 4e Monk baseline, you don't have to do anything special at all outside of pick the powers with the jump/athletics/fly* bonuses. Most optimal would be a Stone Fist monk, they use Dex/Str as their main stats, which will inflate your Athletics (consolidated jump/swim/climb etc) and Acrobatics (balance/tumble/falldmg etc) skills and having a high str will let you use baseline grab attacks. Monks also have plenty of powers with effects like knock prone and forced shifts. There are plenty of utility powers that let you literally run up walls and stuff too.

*Monk at-will and encounter powers, are all combo powers, a standard action and move action combined. A lot of the move actions are actually mechanically flights, but with the requirement that you must land at the end of the movement or you fall. These are those enormous graceful leaps you would see in a Kung-Fu style movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and etc.

You could also get a similar type of character using a Dex/Cha rogue, the artful dodger will let you tumble and jump around a lot easier and some rogue powers also have nice movement bonuses attached to them. You'd have to train unarmed strike if you weren't using a weapon as your jumpy monk. The actual monk class would still be superior for your jumpy monk build though (  :why_so_serious: )



2) Every bard is a Diplomo-Bard, but I know what you want/mean here. I've made this character myself, probably my favorite so far. Cunning Bard, CHA/INT with whatever DEX you can scrounge, Bard of all Trades Feat (+3 bonus to untrained skill checks, Bards have a innate +1 bonus to untrained checks for a +4 total, ACTUAL skill training is a +5 bonus so you are virtually 'trained' in EVERY skill), Multiclass into Rogue (I recommend Twilight Adept MC for rogue) for Duelist Panache (add your cha bonus to ath/acro) feat and access to the Jack of all Trades paragon path (gives you +2 to ALL skills, gives you a bunch of skill re-rolls, gives you 3or4 bonus skills), Multiclass into Sorcerer (if you have 13 str, go Soul of Sorcery, if not go Arcane Prodigy)  for the Sorceress Vision feat (use your arcana skill for perception/insight). If you are Eberron or using Dragonmark feats, get the Mark of Scribing, it's +2 diplomacy, 4 bonus languages and extra fast ritual writing, you sadly can't swap out the ritual writing for alchemist like most of these ritual granting feats and I really like the Bard only rituals provided as the bard class feature so I don't want to swap that to alchemist either. If you can get it, grab the Ioun's Revelation divine boon 'item' for a global +2 item bonus to all skills. Also pick up the utility power Inspire Competence at level 2 (encounter power) and a Wand of Aptitude (gives a big boost to the power and gives an extra use) for more bonuses to skill checks. The Feat Bardic Knowledge gives a +2 bonus to all trained knowledge checks. Familiars also provide a +2 bonus to certain checks that stacks with all the other bonuses you have.

Christ that's a wall of text.

Anyways using that build your "worst" skill checks will be auto successes on any easy DC (literally don't have to roll a die), virtually auto-successes on medium DC and you can power up for a few turns to beat any hard DCs. These are again, your WORST checks.

The Build lets you skill swap or inflate every other skill to a point of hilarity, like my Bard runs around with a Arcana Skill (for super powerful rituals AND super amazing perception and insight) so high, it auto succeeds on generic hard DCs. If start stacking my skill bonus granting powers, I hit skill check results normally reserved for PC's 10 levels above me.

Then its just about picking the powers you want for your characters theme, mine is a gnome so I went with the sneaky, invisible, hidden and teleporty powers. Very much about enabling allies instead of dishing out the pain myself.



3) There's actually a set of feats specifically for spiked chains, and at least 1 paragon path for spiked chains, that let you powerswap into a bunch of spiked chain specific powers. Then you just fill the holes with grabby/proney fighter powers.

We could complain that a single book isn't living up to the multi-year history of the previous edition instead... because 3e didn't have ANY extra spells or classes in other books for that edition.  :oh_i_see:

Did anyone ever actually play 1E as written? My own experience suggests "hahahahaha, oh fuck no, are you crazy?"

You did that and the GM didn't have the book blow up in your face and tpk the party? Wow, ok.

Necronomicon, an ancient magic artifact spellbook ?

Yeah, it's reflecting that shit Back At Ya if the DM is worth a damn.

Or eating it.

I shall take up Fordel's challenge!

This is a build I seriously contemplated for a replacement character in a ninth level game:

Wizard with high Str, Dex, Con, and an Int of 11 (which means he could only cast 1st level spells)
Six different meta magic feats, to use all of his 2nd through 5th level spell slots on. Essentially just bumping up the effectiveness of all his various 1st level spells.

Ok, seriously, it was a retarded idea, but I could have made the character, and I probably would have had fun with him, even though he'd be fairly useless. In 4th, you couldn't actually mechanically do this (you can't intentionally gimp yourself out of higher level powers afaik), but even if you could, having those high physical stats would do nothing for you, as none of your powers would use them.

The thing about 4th that really got to me though,was that it felt like everything had very precise, exact mechanics. You can do this exact manouver, which will have this exact effect, excatly this many times per X. Yes, some things fall under that in 3.5/PF, but not everything...

Take illusions for example. I find it highly unlikely that you would ever find anything that played the way silent/minor/major/programmed image do in 3.5/PF in 4th. Simply because, there are almost no hard rules about how they work - it has to be worked out between DM and player every time you use them. Sure, you might have rituals that duplicate similar effects, but essentially rituals in 4e are just spells that the designers decided that you wouldn't be allowed to use in combat, because there was no easy way to balance their effects with every other class.

Also, Lantyssa hit one of my issues right on the head - 4e really made a shitty impression with the opening 3 books. Essentially, they gave you six classes, with two builds each (stat A or stat B). Then they appeared to have tried to "fix" it with the standard Wizards approach: 3 new books per month.

With Pathfinder, for character design my group uses two hardcovers (Players Handbook, Advanced Player Guide) and maybe a companion guide ($10) that comes with whatever adventure path we are playing. Oh, and if you don't want to buy the companions for extra options, everything for character design is available free on the PFSRD.

He was paralyzed for the entire encounter.  That's a little better than reflecting a Magic Missile.


When you pick powers it's x level or lower.  So you pretty much want a bog-standard Wizard picking low level powers out of PHB and Arcane Power, maybe multi or hybrid class it to a martial class (I'd hybrid it to fighter for ultimate gimpage), and maybe pick up the skill powers out of PHB3:


 :awesome_for_real:

I'd still like to hear Fordel's take though.

EDIT: There are enough level 1 Encounter and Daily powers for a level 30 character in the PHB alone, but Arcane Power gives you some flexibility.

You can gimp yourself pretty badly by keeping your main attack stat low. Start with an 8 or something (or even the 11 int). If you avoid magic implements, never take an expertise feat or raise your int, etc, you will easily be completely terrible by late heroic tier and by epic you will be just about useless. It doesn't matter too much if you have the powers if you can never hit, that would probably be the 4e equivalent of the high level wizard who doesn't know any good spells.

Don't even have to gimp yourself that way.  The rules explicitly leave open the option of buying low level powers just because you want to be crazy, and you never have more than 2 at-will powers, 4 encounter powers, 4 daily powers, and 7 utility powers.

Don't forget multiclassing either.  Everyone needs a Utility 2 Rogue power, right?   :awesome_for_real:

I do really like the multiclassing feats that let you take power(s) from other classes.  That is great for replicating random weird stuff that may have been around in the past.  Like before they (re)made the assassin class, I made an old assassin as a Rogue with a couple of Fighter whirlwindy-type powers, and it pretty much replicated what I had in my head with not very much fuss at all.

By the way it was 8 classes in the first PHB, not 6 (Cleric, Paladin, Rogue, Ranger, Fighter, Warlock, Warlord, Wizard.) If you throw in PHB 2's 8 more classes (Bard, Barbarian, Druid, Invoker, Avenger, Warden, Shaman, Sorcerer) the number of options you're at with 2 books is all of one class less than PF with 2 books I believe.

I'll grant you, they probably took too long to give us a 4e monk (and arguably too long to give us bard/barbarian/druid/sorcerer), they should have prioritized getting all the original 3e classes replaced to help ease people converting over. I think they made a mistake by not providing the conversion assistance they did when 3e hit, they made a poor assumption that everyone was going to prefer to start over (I remember statements from them to the effect of "ehh.... you can't really convert, just start over"). Really that was probably the single biggest mistake they made in the transition, they were always going to lose the people who sperged out when diagonal movement changed, etc., but faster support for old options would have gone a long way.

This for me too.

Not that I would advise you to sign up for something for a game you aren't interested in, but fyi, the dndinsider subscription stuff gives you access to everything from every book (as an aside, I hope they are making enough money from this to stay in business, because you can easily have players now who don't need to buy anything but the $25/3 months subscription).  

So something being in some obscure side book is no longer nearly as much of an issue as it used to be.  Basically you can read everything except for flavor text online in the character builder or compendium.  The main problem now is not lack of available options but information overload, with too many options.  Fortunately some crazy people like Fordel read EVERYTHING and so when I have a question like 'what's the name of a feat or power that lets you jump further' he can peep right up and tell me what to look for specifically on dndinsider instead of searching for 'jump' and wading through everything.  But my point is, I wouldn't need to own Jumping Power 2: The Jumpening hardback book to do this, and all the classes that have shown up since the beginning of 4E are now on an equal playing field as far as access to their info for everyone (there is a delay from book->showing up in the online stuff, but it's not too terrible).

 

So, they actually decided to start adding flavour text after the first three books? Seriously, that was the first thing that got me worried when reading the 4e PHB the first time - they crammed a shit load of rules in to those books, but there was none of the traditional D&D book flavour.

Well, the style is pretty much the same. They are certainly nothing like the AD&D rules for idle reading, but nothing really is.

PHB1: Cleric, Paladin, Rogue, Ranger, Fighter, Warlock, Warlord, Wizard.

PHB2: Bard, Barbarian, Druid, Invoker, Avenger, Warden, Shaman, Sorcerer.

PHB3: Ardent, Battlemind, Monk, Psion, Runepriest, Seeker.

They should have cut this down to one release date, instead of one in spring of each year.  Even more glaring given their release schedule is the numerous times that classes which are almost identical to each other thematically or in role appear side by side in the same book, the number of classes that appear in PHB2 which should have been there on release, and the classes nobody gives a damn about or which are redundant in PHB2 and PHB3.

Seriously though, everything is about maximizing the IP and seeing how many different books you can get the players to buy rather than the convenience of having all the information you need in one PHB and being done with it.

Show me the edition of D&D that didn't do that? Even 1e had Unearthed Arcana. Players, by and large, WANT more books with more stuff.

This is the first edition that really *does* have everything all in one "book", it is just that book is actually a subscription to DDI.

In 2E and 3E you had the PHB, the DMG, and the MM, and those were the "core books" that were all you needed to play the game.  Supplements existed, but me and my group by and large didn't use them and didn't miss them.  If you weren't the DM, all you needed was the PHB to know absolutely everything you needed to know about how to make a character and play the game.

On the couple of occasions where I've tried to get into a 4E game, I get a stack of like 6 books dumped on me (or an equivalent quantity of PDFs to scroll through) so I can make a character, and I am told that I can't really make a viable character with just what's in the PHB1, or even with all 3 PHBs put together.

This might just be a marketing difference, where the PHB1 is really functionally equivalent to the old PHB, and WotC has just done a really good job of making the optional supplements LOOK LIKE core books so that everyone THINKS they need them.  At the very least, it's still distasteful.

Ah. Well that bit isn't really true, at least, at least no more true than it is for 3E - I eventually kind of hated building PHB-only characters in 3E since a lot of the important feat support for class features and stuff was in other books. You can always build stronger characters in any edition once you have all the options at hand. We all know players for whom the word viable actually means optimal, but you can definitely function in 4e with a PHB-only character - especially if your DM is similarly restricted to the MM1.*

Building a 4E player character without character builder software does suck though, that's a totally fair criticism. It is a bit worse in 4e than 3e in that regard, even with similar piles of options available, just because you're typically making more choices on a 4e character now - not only picking feats on a fighter, but a stack of powers as well, etc.

*One exception is the math bug around attack rolls and non-AC defenses, core-only groups should really consider at least allowing the expertise and defense feats that 'patch' these, by late paragon it gets pretty evident.

My first character was a Ranger, and my second is a Warlord. Both characters take the majority of their powers from the expanded books. (Whatever they're called) because all the powers I saw in the PHB1 were vanilla bland.
Hell, my Ranger used Twin Strike rather than the lame enounter and daily powers from that book.

Except it doesn't seem to be working.  I haven't paid them anything, even though I would want to normally.

As the others already mentioned, you can just take first level wizard powers all the way down every new level and keep your Int at a 8, you'll be throwing basic melee attacks in cloth for 30 levels and suck just as much as you would in 3e.  :awesome_for_real:


The actual THEME of your character build (not it's shittyness) , is generally called an At-Will specialist, where all their feats and power selection goes into buffing their At-Will spells, with their encounter and daily spells being either super situational or simply buffs for their At-Wills. You can do this with a Wizard, but a physical/casting split in stats would work much better on say, a Sorcerer, which actually uses either Str or Dex as their secondary stat. Then you can start multiclassing and powerswaping into a more physical class if you want useful physical stat powers outside of the universal basic attacks and grabs and shit.


Alternatively, you might enjoy a Psion or Ardent from a mechanics standpoint. The way Augmenting powers works in 4e is probably the nearest to Metamagic feat stacking enhancing shenanigans. Psions and Ardent's don't have encounter powers, they just have at-will and daily powers. Their At-Will powers though, are augmentable through power points. So the spell is <herp> baseline, but you could spend a power point and it would now be <herp+derp> or you could spend 2 points and it would be <herp+derp+blurf>. You get a nice pool of points to play with and they regenerate after a short or extended rest. Then you can extend this with feats and PP's and etc.



-fake edit-

Looking over what the old 3.5 MetaMagic feats actually do, most of that functionality is tied into Wizard implement specializations, still in existing feats, or entirely irrelevant in the 4e system.

Heighten Spell, Quicken Spell, Silent Spell and Still Spell are all irrelevant in the 4e action and power system.

Enlarge Spell and Widen Spell have their own Feat equivalents in 4e to increase spell range and radius, though I think Enlarge spell is actually the radius increase in 4e, with something else being for distance, Far spell I think.

The rest are handled through Wizard Implement class features or Feats, though I don't think there is a direct parallel to Maximize spell itself, but plenty of things that fit its theme. Bonus damage when using blah keywords, bonus die when blah vulnerable etc.



So yea, At-Will specialist with Multiple Orb/Tome wizard specs (feat for it) would do it. Toss in a expanded spell book so you can choose from even more low level spells that will never hit thanks to your abysmal intelligence!  :awesome_for_real:

You'll always have magic missle though!



PS. "having those high physical stats would do nothing for you, as none of your powers would use them."

What does this even mean, like, I don't remember having a high str being awesome for a Wizard in previous editions either. Dex for AC isn't required, because you can get AC in no/light armor from Dex OR Int and normally wizards have plenty of Int. Con is actually a Wizard secondary in 4e, Staff spec uses it and it might have a few riders, but wizard powers in general have very few riders.

-fake edit 2- -real edit 1-

Ratman, you and every other ranger in 4e, because Twin Strike is actually the single most damaging At-Will in the game. Double attacking does great things in the 4e system.



-real edit 2-

If you are going FR campaign or including Gensai, then you actually can use Str as a secondary for wizard shit, whole builds built around Gensai Wizards with Int/Str.

Wait what?!? You cant cast illusion in combat in 4e?

There are illusion type combat-usable powers. There's a whole illusionist build for the mage even.

Yea, I don't know where this NO ILLUSION thing is coming from either, bards, wizards and psions can all heavily focus on Illusion effects, there's lots of feat support for Illusion specific things and the entire Gnomish Race in 4e is based around Illusions and Charm.

Illusion stuff was a later add-on and not in the main books. I think it was part of Arcane Power I.

There are a number of illusion utility powers even in the first PHB - blur, mirror image, invisibility, greater invisibility, etc.

This whole thread pisses me off. I haven't had a gaming group since the 80s.

I am seriously looking at Castle Ravenloft and this (http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/games/e5bf/) as potential ways to at least get my wife playing something with me.

I'm sure the linked item may give some neckbearded folks a chance for amazing levels of indignation.

AHFUCK! THEY COPIED THE BASIC SET, BUT IT'S NASTY 4TH EDITION! WTF? KIRK IS SUPERIOR TO PICARD!

I'd get Ashardalon for an gateway game. The first time playing, we drew the dragon hisself within about 2 tiles into the dungen. He smushed us all. Good times.  :grin:

When people say 'illusion' they usually mean phantasmal force or silent image or what have you, not just generic illusion school stuff.  That's like, the iconic illusion spell, and when someone says 'cast illusion' that's pretty much always what they meant - those, or one of the upgraded versions.

As Koyasha said - I'm under the assumption that illusions in 4e all have very specific effects, based onthe power being used. In 3.5, if I want to use silent image to make a Bugs Bunny tunnel through the mountain, there aren't any hard set rules on how that will play out with a given monster - it becomes a collabaration between the DM and player for each specific situation (which I enjoy). I'm sure you could find away to duplicate that type of scenario in 4e (rules are maleable of course) but the system isn't designed for it. To me, 4ed comes accross as a system designed to have a hard fast rule for everything (as far as combat goes).

To me "Bugs Bunny Tunnel" in 4ed would be something like this:

Utility Power. Int vs. Will.  Range 6. On hit, slide target 6 squares towards "Tunnel". 1d8+Int damage.

 :oh_i_see:


It was just a reference to the fact that every class has a different stat that seems to determine if they hit or not in 4ed. If I make a 3.5 Wizard with 18 str, he won't be as good in combat as Fighter certainly, but he'll still hit things over the head with his staff quite effectively. Yes, I could do the same in 4ed with a "basic attack" - however my impression of basic attacks in 4ed was basically, something you only ever used if you were absolutely forced in to it by no other options.

My 11 Int, 18 Dex Wizard in 3.5 would have lousy save DCs, but would be awesome at hitting with ray spells.

I'd forgotten that they made AC bonus come from Dex or Int in 4ed. Yea, it makes it easier to focus a build, but it also feels limiting to me - basically railroading you in to maxing out your two primary stats.

Also note - in Pathfinder, Polymorph spells retain the Wizards base physical stats as well, so there is a noticable benefit to that school to have high Str/Dex/Con.

Yeah thats what I meant. Invisibility is invisibility= you cant see me. Illusion is illusion= Giant Gold Dragon appears in the doorway attempting to eat the evil death knight.
Not the same.

Why do you hate balance?

Basic Attacks in 4e are just the most baseline, not any kind of 'last resort' or anything. Defenders get the most use out of them (usually through OAs), but they are also a way to provide bonus damage, usually via a more support oriented character granting basic attacks to an ally. By default they are STR based, but you can feat around that easily (think Weapon Finesse but without weapon restrictions and for any stat) and many class at-wills also count as a 'basic attack', such as magic missile for example. 


The only stat you get 'railroaded' into is your attack stat, for a wizard that would be INT. Wizards have very few riders on their powers that use a secondary, and even the most rider dependent classes still have roughly half of their powers without a rider and most classes have at least two different stat choices in rider. Maxing a rider isn't nearly as important as maxing your primary attack/hit stat, and plenty of builds spread their stats around for skills and multi-classing.


It's just a difference in the combat system, instead of all melee being STR based and all ranged being DEX based, there's a class specific stat instead. It doesn't limit diversity of builds at all. Arguably expands it if anything.


Even with 18 str, your 3e wizard isn't hitting with any kind of effectiveness, not with a wizards BAB table :-P

Pretty sure utility powers don't do damage ever.  :why_so_serious:

I also have to laugh at the notion that having more than one stat cover a defense is somehow "railroading" you into keeping your two main stats as high as possible, rather than simply "not punishing." If you're the type of person that thinks an 11 int wizard with awesome physical stats is a great idea, I seriously doubt letting int and dex cover the same defense is going to deter you.



Also, how many level 1 ray spells are there in 3.5? I can't think of any, unless Pathfinder added some. I only remember the level 0 one. I mostly ignored the wizardy type classes though, because I fucking hated them. I had a vanara wu jen and that was MORE THAN ENOUGH for me. I have a high level cleric, but as I got to start her at level 16 or 17 (I forget), it doesn't count.

That cleric is also way, way, way closer to her original in-my-brain concept in 4th than she was in 3rd, it pleases me.

Ray of enfeeblement is the only one that comes to mind from the core rules - there are a bunch of 'lesser orb of <element>' ones added in a later book (Complete Mage or Arcane, reprinted in the Spell Compendium) but I don't think we get to count books outside the core 3 right now.  :grin:

EDIT:
The spells like phantasmal force and stuff always bothered me from a resolution standpoint, I know some groups see it as a method for some kind of narrative collaboration between player and DM but a lot of the time I saw it coming down to players expecting to be able to do things they shouldn't be able to do at a given spell level, etc. I've never really been a fan of 'blank check' spells going back to first edition. /shrug There are rituals that cover various out-of-combat uses of these things, although I do think rituals are still kind of underdeveloped as a game mechanic, they could use a once-over.

I think the biggest issue with rituals is simply their component cost. Equal level rituals are a significant chunk of your character wealth while under level rituals are trivially cheap but often still scale perfectly with skill/level.


It's not like 3e didn't have component costs either, but it seemed easier to hand wave them away when it was like 5 pinches of bat guano and gold dust or whatever.

Heh, you spotted the major flaw in my build, which was one reason I never tried it.

Just to be clear guys, I'm continuing on with this discussion primarily because I consider it a fun topic to argue, and I may be trolling a little here and there. If you want me to really go off on an RPG concept, lets talk SDC/MDC.  :grin:

Yea, there are some issues with how they did rituals.

Longest game of 4ed I played in, I played an Eladrin Paladin who multied in to Wizard, because it fit the concept I had in mind. This was first three books only.
I took the feat or whatever it was to allow me to do rituals as early as I could. (side note - being stuck as the only healer in the party as a 4ed Paladin was not a good thing)

I did two rituals in the 7 or 8 levels I played that character... Not becuase I didn't like them, or didn't want to do them - but becuase I couldn't afford them. 3.5 at least limited the expensive components to spells that had a fairly major game impact, like Raise Dead or Restoration.

Well not if you MC to Wizard no  :why_so_serious:

You'd have to be pretty exacting in a paladin build to make it really functional as a primary healing type guy.

Admittedly, it was our first run at 4ed. We'd gotten used to the idea that you could make up for a lack of a dedicated healer in 3.5 (UMD a cure lt wand, potions, etc).

You still can, but it's more about being proactive with your own powers and surges then just hoarding a bunch of heal pots.

It is true though that a party without a leader role type has a much narrower margin of error in any given encounter than one that has one. The big contrast to 3.5 in that respect is that very little healing tended to take place *during* encounters in 3.5, where 4e's combat model more expects you to sort of initially take a beating in a fight and then battle back using your surges and stuff as an advantage over the monsters or whatever.

Well, yeah.  Why are you buying the game if not for that?

I'm enjoying this thread.  FWIW I played D&D when it was still "D&D" (and other oldies like Traveller) in the 80's.  I still have all my original books and modules.  Tomorrow, my wife and I are going to a dinner party for my first RPG game since maybe 1995/6 (which was Shadowrun) and it will be her first.  It's Pathfinder.  I'm playing a hobbit cleric with domains of healing/knowledge.  She's playing a gnome druid whose animal companion is a wolf (which can be her mount I believe).  I'm jazzed.

I don't have any strong opinon on 4e.  I played D&D up until I felt they super-saturated the market with Forgotten Realms and 3e and 3.5 handbooks.  A lot of you have pointed the following but not directly: the costs to play PnP games, particularly, D&D can be prohibitive. It just feels exploitive to people after while, particularly the young.  Cards, figurines, mats, supplement after supplement... After awhile I just resented that TSR couldn't rationalize and stabilize their rule sets long enough to not justify pushing another handbook supplement on us.  All of these things are optional, but be honest -- for gamers there's nothing really optional is there?

It's true you don't need to re-purchase the DM Guide all the time.  But I always felt since 2nd edition that the ruleset was out of control.  Now, with the 4ed it feels they're simulating MMO-play in PnP, figurines and all.  I guess that's a fine strategy to pull in the new and young players.  I just wonder by this logic and trend if the 5e will be following web games -- maybe more social rules less combat?

If they start making their money off of card/figurine/mat/adventure sales and cut the number of rule book releases down it would be a good thing.

Pfft.  If this happened I'd just buy more books from other IPs.  (shrug)  You should see my closet and bookshelves.
To me it matters not if they have a million books for a single IP.  Half the time the DM/GM is gonna house-rule or only use a specific ruleset anyways.  The other half we'll likely be playing something else.  All in all, the more tools the better and there's no way to fit it all into a single tome.

Also, you really just have to look at 4e as the new D20 and not even worry about it.  D&D itself is therein just a rough lore template to do all kinds of crazy shit in... each version of which requires books.  Beyond that you have stuff like "Gamma World" 4e that just came out and a slew of other stuff that's in the works.

And let's be real.  Right now the entry into the genre is a lot friendlier than it used to be, which is a good thing.  I can whip out a 4e encounter and most people would likely enjoy it much more than any other "boardgame" they'd play and yet they wouldnt feel like a grognard doing it.   The nerdy bits that people are uncomfortable with are entirely unnecessary in 4e, but easily bolted on... which is a lot better than the reverse, which many PnP games seem to do - roleplay/freestyle first and worry about the system-feel later.   I'd rather have a solid boardgamey/MMOish system to trick my gamerz into roleplaying with than a roleplaying system I have to trick them to game with.   :oh_i_see:

Then maybe down the road I can throw crazed Indie shit on the table and not feel bad about it.

Okay, now I'm intrigued by this dex wizard concept and wish to explore it.  What about taking Weapon Finesse(touch) and using Shocking Grasp and/or Chill Touch?  Or just loading up on Ray of Enfeeblement and accepting that you'll have a support role for a couple of levels?

That or just research a level 1 ray spell to fill in the gap.  Shit, if I were DMing I'd be inclined to make one up myself and make it one of your starting spells.

To put on my 3.5 hat for a moment, the major issues are you're feat starved and there aren't that many real good spells to pick from in the core book. You *need* point blank shot and precise shot. You can't take Weapon Finesse until level 3 anyway (requires a +1 base attack bonus), so by then you may as well just use spectral hand to make those level 1 spells ranged touch attacks instead. Without the spell compendium, you don't get any real effective attack spells until level 3 when you can learn scorching ray. It isn't a bad build at all but it really, really wants access to the spell compendium for the orb spells in order to be vaguely useful for the first couple levels. Ray of enfeeblement doesn't get super awesome until you can do crazy stuff with empowering it etc.

It probably is at its strongest as a warmage (base class from Complete Arcane) but then you do give up all pretense of utility spellcasting. A sorcerer splits the difference on that front.

Fuck a spell compendium.  I'm sure 4E did away with the concept of independent spell research, but didn't your DM let you do any of that in previous editions?  Stuff that does straight up damage isn't even that hard to balance.

I did a little of it in a 1e game at some point. I don't honestly remember if 3E has rules for it or not.

I don't think it had hard and fast rules with elaborate point-buy mechanisms or anything like that.  More like "look at the other spells of the same level and try to not to make yours overpowered by comparison, and then whatever the DM says goes."  I tended to be a real hardass about new spells (because I didn't trust my players to not be trying to sneak in some clever game-breaking tactic), but straight up offensive spells are hard to mess up.

I am a big believer in rules systems that take away the 'have to convince the DM this is ok' factor (in part due to said 1e spell research). But yeah it shouldn't really be too difficult. Those orb spells are all d6/2 levels, cap at 5d6, close range, touch attack, do whatever elemental damage, first level spells. Pretty straightforward stuff. (There was a lot of argument about the 4th level ones possibly being overpowered, they carried secondary effects).

Wow, now I'm starting to wonder if I've been out of this for so long that I have missed entire editions.

When I started playing, the books were branded as Advanced D&D. One of my buddies had his dad's books from college. He was proud that he had original cover art. We had the PHB, the GM Guide, Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, Oriental Adventures, and Unearthed Arcana. So is that 2nd ed?  (EDIT -- I recall also having a boxed edition that was the basic D&D where you just picked a class and race was tied to that class. The red box version.)

At some point before that gaming group dissolved, we'd been using brown, thin, paperback books as well, but we hadn't adopted a new PHB or anything. I recall the books just providing builds and some new classes, but we had always used THAC0 for combat. I don't think those were 3e.

It's been a long time, and our group moved on to other games and ultimately dissolved in the early 90s when Shadowrun was newish.

TLDR version:

1. Books that had only changed cover art since the 70s. (Barring expansions like UA and OA)
2. No D&D games since 1990.
3. Which version is that?

Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures means this was 1st edition.

2nd edition has the weird blue text/art everywhere in the main books.

3rd edition has brown notebook-like lines on each page.

This is why games like GURPS and Rolemaster became my group's core systems, I think. We had one kid who always had to be something ridiculous. Those systems seemed to encourage/enable free-form without being overly cumbersome. At one point, we were trying to build our own game, and we largely stole the mechanics from GURPS, Heroes Unlimited, and pre-2020 Cyberpunk. We never got it finished, largely because it was easier to use GURPS and just come to a consensus about the game world.

So did first edition have brown paperback add-on books? IIRC, the bard class was in one of them. They were no thicker than a TPB comic.

I have never, ever seen that statement before.  :why_so_serious:

It makes lots of sense in the context of this group and its resident munchkin/snowflake player. He was the kind of guy who wanted to base house rules on house rules. He was the Learned Hand of rules jurists. For whatever reason, GURPS was easier.

That sounds to me like you were mixing in some of the old 1974 D&D stuff with your AD&D - typically called OD&D now to make it distinct what you mean.

EDIT: Although, brown cover could also mean the 2nd edition Complete Fighter type stuff with kits, etc. Are we talking thick enough to write a title on the spine? 2E came out in '88 so if you only added these in towards the end those would be 2nd edition things. Sounds like you had a mix in any case.

The trick is to keep killing his bullshit characters until he stops making them.

That's an unpleasant arms race for the rest of the party.

Yeah, repeated character murder doesn't seem like it would really deter much.

I will say, I really enjoy the concept of GURPS. I could probably make characters all day. But I don't especially like trying to actually PLAY it. If that makes sense.

That's exactly how far we got with GURPS. Bought the books, sat down one night and made characters; our GM went home that night to learn the mechanics, and immediately told us to roll new D&D characters.

You can totally do this. It just takes 10 minutes because spells like "earth to mud" and "mud to stone" should not be something that you can do in 6 seconds. Spells like that require timing and patience  and effort. They require setup.

In fact there is a spell specifically for what you want to do. It has a level 12 minimum (so early paragon tier, about level 6-8 for 3.5). Its called "Hallucinatory Creature". It lasts for 24, can be determined false by an insight check against your Arcana check. It takes 10 minutes to use and costs 500 gp(I.E. a pittance at level 12)

All the divinations are there, teleportation is there, portals and storage is there. Scrying is there etc. (just the PHB 1)

And there is no limit to the number of rituals that any player can have. That is right, any player can take the ritual casting feat(wizards get it free) and then use Rituals. Want to make a wizard that hits things and has a high str? Take a str based class, multi-wizard(for arcana as a trained skill if you didn't get it) and then ritual casting. Boom. First level as a human, second for anything else.

1st edition book with a few basic sets (http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=1st%20edition%20d%26d&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1680&bih=934)

2nd edition stuff (note the blue outline and font change) (http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&biw=1680&bih=934&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=2nd+edition+d%26d&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=) [Mixed with a lot of 1st ed stuff, too.  Planescape and Darksun were both 2nd Ed.]

The black books in there were the OD&D.  Kind of a cross between 2nd edition and basic.  Probably the worst of all the versions.

3rd edition stuff (http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&biw=1680&bih=934&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=3rd+edition+d%26d&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=)

1st and 2nd were fairly close in systems.  Merging the two wouldn't be that hard.  3rd edition was a complete revamp.  4th was again.

It doesn't.

But if the alternative is playing GURPS?  Sometimes it's the DM's duty to write up the stats for a Magma Nymph.

Which is why they can now really push these "living campaigns," encounters, renown points, this new CCG element (fortune cards?), and D&D League play moreso now than they ever could before.

In prior editions you really couldnt do this w/o overlooking rule creep and subjective DMing.

Steve Jackson games look lots more fun than they actually are.

There was an article once about what a Wizard could actually manage if he used True Strike to the fullest extent.

It was quite fucking scary, actually.  Throwing in the Meta-Magic feats and some multi-classing and you pretty much had something Game-Breaking.

Those sound like the books. Now that I think about it, one of the guys in the group may have actually purchased the 2e PHB and DMG.

EDIT -- Based on the links Lant posted, we definitely were blending the 2e kit books into 1e until someone ponied up money for the PHB and DMG.

Minor derail:  We drove up to GenCon one year.  We had an argument about a rule (3.5).  So we get there and there's the actual writers of 3.5.  They were meeting the public so I went up and politely asked if they could tell us the proper explanation for the rule.  They sided with me. :)  My friend STILL didn't believe it!  He just couldn't admit I was right.  One of my best gaming moments.  :grin:

Learn2entropy Wizards of the Coast, for fucks sake.

What does that mean ?  Is that some kind of whack attack ?

You knock enemy A into enemy B which then knocks enemy B into enemy C which then repeats until you are out of enemy's to cascade into each other. It's a push to it will eventually run out of things to knock as each target must be a bit further from you.

That's stupid.

It's level appropriate! Level's 21+ in 4e are well into 'fighting gods and demons as superheroes' territory. You start to get powers based around ideas like "The first time you DIE this day..."  :why_so_serious:

And if you cheese it, you can pretty much roll an army off a cliff, or into a wall where they all grind against each other until one is left, et cetera.

Unless the magma nymph gets you first. :oh_i_see:

It's pretty standard action/super hero movie stuff really. Flinging the badguy into all his badguy friends and they all tumble together in a heap.

...and continue to collide with each other recursively until only one is left alive? :awesome_for_real:

The push prevents them from endlessly colliding. If it was a slide, sure, you could knock them back and forth, but the push means you'll run out of targets pretty fast unless you are dealing with a horde of badguys or whatever.

Technically you don't have to push them anywhere, it's the triggering character's discretion how many squares to push, and what direction.

It just begs to be house ruled so hard, and if I were DM and anyone decided to abuse it they'd need that "...the first time you die today" power when they spot a sexy nymph just chillin' out in the magma beckoning them over.

You get a save to be pushed off a cliff. Once you push one guy off the end of the cliff there will be no one adjacent to him so you can't push that guy.

You will also eventually miss, since its a secondary attack.

That being said, I do think they forgot about the whole "push 0" thing and so forgot to word the power in a way that fixed it (I.E. just say that the secondary target has to be adjacent and further away from you than the prior target)

Re-roll last attack effects / temporary attack bonuses means you could draw out the chain for a bit.

It's kind of academic, because it's the sort of thing that the DM would immediately overrule, and then decide to slay your character for.

All you would have to do too 'full-proof' the power, is say that a target may only be effected once by this attack.


There's a Sorc at-will that does something similar, where if you are lucky you can just build up a chain reaction of attacks, but has that wording to prevent infinity hit.

Or you could make a house rule than any creature that's prone cannot be struck by the flying character.

Then, because you're an absolute asshole of a DM, you give every monster afterwards the ability to dive prone as an immediate interrupt. :awesome_for_real:

Isn't falling prone a free action to begin with or whatever. I'd have to double check zee rule book.

Minor Action.

It should be a free action.  Alternatively you should be able to spend a minor action to prepare a minor action, rather than preparation always being a standard (by the rules).

You have some weirdly bloodthirsty DMs. Either that or you are the bloodthirsty DM.

We had a stupidly bloodthirsty DM who only got one session before we demoted him.

This was in like 7th grade, so maturity may have played a role.

DM: "You see a small bag on the ground."

ThiefGuy Player: "I pick it up and open it."

DM: "A giant spider jumps out and kills you."

That's literally how it went. He then gave the thief guy a chance to save vs death, and tried to convince the rest of the party it was cool because the bag was actually a bag of holding and that's how the spider fit therein and had some kind of unstoppable stealth attack.

Admittedly, the thief guy was the annoying snowflake guy, so it was kind of ok with us. I mean, a bag of holding is useful. We decided that the spider bag move was too stupid and blatantly mean to allow him to keep running games.

I've only had one DM that seemed to consider it a failure on his part if he didn't murder at least one person in the party per play session. I stopped playing in that group because it just wasn't very fun (although most of the not-fun-to-me part wasn't so much the murderous intent and rather some other game-related stuff that is really too boring to relate). Proudft is about the level of murder I can stand. He's perfectly capable of wiping us out (he just did two sessions ago, in fact) but I never feel like "OK, this is a bullshit encounter designed to kill us all unless we pull some rules-lawyering bullshit out of our collective ass." Ingmar mostly runs modules so he doesn't get to count.

HEAR THAT INGMAR

YOU DON'T COUNT

I hate intentionally killing players just to kill them - they usually have to do something really stupid for me to pull some kind of 'you die' thing on them.  However, I like to just design situations without considering the party - I design them by considering what the NPC that's creating them would do.  So sometimes they seem really hard and sometimes they seem very easy, but they always seem logical, and it's almost always possible for the players to learn what they're likely to be up against.  It usually works better for me than trying to design an encounter that is meant to be difficult but defeatable.

The other thing I like to consider is a little self-limiting rule that sometimes I let players take advantage of too.  I can make an on-the-fly adjustment to something I have decided, with the justification 'he would have thought of that' once for every point of intelligence or wisdom (usually whichever is higher) that exceeds 'average'.  So if the players do something I didn't expect but they're infiltrating the lair of a 21 INT lich or something, I can change things on the fly (because I know I don't have 21 Int, so I can't think of everything he would).  But putting a limit based on the character's stats prevents it from being a 'no matter what they do, I counter it' situation.  When it seems appropriate I allow players to do that too.  They think of something they should have done that the character would reasonably have thought of, then poof, they did it.  Maybe they purchased exactly the right piece of equipment for this situation.

It's really the only reasonable way I can think of to represent characters that are vastly more intelligent than their players.

It's often not about setting out to kill players intentionally, few GMs do that I think. It is the duty of the GM to reach across the table and smack people upside the head if they start trying to munchkinise the system "because the rules don't specifically state that I can't do that..."

If I run a game and someone thinks it would be funny to bring in PunPun, they go out the balcony.

Yes.  That's why it's stupid.

See, proudft just looks sternly at the person trying to be lame and says no and we move on. Clearly I don't play with enough jerkfaces.  :why_so_serious:

Ironwood doesn't approve of Goblin bowling :(

No.  Especially when they do it in movies and you hear that fucking annoying 'bowling pins knocked over' sound effect.  I remember watching one 'serious' film where the hero threw someone into a crowd of baddies and cue the 'pins'.  It totally fucked me off.

No.

It's Stupid.

His name is Gary Gygax. (http://www.somethingawful.com/d/dungeons-and-dragons/wtf-tomb-horrors.php)

I don't have a problem with making intelligent NPCs make intelligent choices.  Where I have to be careful is making sure they're not cheating and acting on knowledge of the players that they wouldn't have.

This makes recurring villains awesome--they can pull out all the stops because they know what the party is and is capable of, and I can take advantages of the groups' weaknesses (such as the full-auto archery ranger of death and his low, low will save--nothing like dominating him and making him shoot the party instead  :grin: )

Older dragons are the exception.  I will completely metagame them in regards to the party.  If you've survived a thousand years of player characters barging into your lair trying to steal your loot, odds are you can identify everything about a character down to his last feat and skill point by smell & taste.

Orb spells:  I find them cheesy.  Not because they're overpowered, but it felt to me like they created the Warmage, realized that it would have a weakness to overcoming spell resistance, and then instead of saying "welp, them's the breaks" they went and made a bunch of spells just to eliminate that weakness.  Because a "conjured" chunk of fire is different than an "evoked" chunk of fire somehow.  Plus, throwing an orb of conjured sound  :uhrr:

What are some of y'all's favorite house rules?  One I like (3.5e) is to allow folks with the tumble skill to oppose someone else's tumble check, no matter what armor they're in.  It doesn't come into play often (not a lot of my NPCs use tumble) but it's nice to mess with the guys abusing the low tumble DCs sometimes.  The players always seem to forget that I allow it when they could be applying it themselves, which is another nice bonus...

I want to say my tumble house rule was that the DC was 10 + the reflex save of the person you're tumbling past instead of a flat 15. Pathfinder has a more complicated way of doing it.

Killer DMs are stupid, but if you go too far in the other direction, you get garbage like Dragonlance. The most railroady, plot is more important than fun, piece of twee made into a series of modules.

Pathfinder cleaned up a lot of the opposed roles of 3.5 (which were inherently way too random). All combat manuevers are CMB + d20 vs target's CMD.
CMB = Str Mod + Base Atk + size mod (feat available to use Dex mod instead)
CMD = Str Mod + Dex Mod + size Mod + 10

Tumble is now Acrobatics roll vs. CMD, which means tougher opponents are harder to tumble past (as it should have been in 3.5).

As to the Dex mage mentioned earlier, it is doable in pathfinder. They removed the +1 prereq on Weapon Finesse, so as a Human, you can have Finesse and Point Blank to start, add Precise at third. Lack of feats for a 3.5 Wizard isn't as bad, as Pathfinder gives you a feat every odd level.

Heh, just after I hit submit, I realized that there is no reason for Weapon Finesse in the first place... That's for melee weapons. So yea, human wizard/sorcerer with Point Blank shot and Precise shot to start. Works especially well when you consider that 0 level spells are unlimited in PF, so you can Ray of Frost to your heart's content. Add some Rogue and head to Arcane Trickster for added fun of Sneak Attack Ray of Frosts.  :grin:

That's actually the PF character I'm playing right now - except my dex is 11, and I'm a gnome, so I had to wait for level 3 for precise shot. It still works fine even without the high dex, though, touch ACs are typically very hittable, and by the time they're not I'll have other options. I had the pyromancer trait + burning hands to make up for the lack of good ray spell at level 1, but it still wasn't what I'd call ideal for a bit. Have scorching ray now, though, so zapping ahoy.

That reminds me of my brother's time-travelling Samurai, using a misprint about Great Cleave (wherein it wasn't limited to your dex bonus). If you lined up enough chickens at five foot intervals, you could Great Cleave your way through them -- all in a single round. Which could result in you moving faster than the speed of light.

Admittedly, he had to fudge a magic sword that could make automatic hits on anything more than X levels below him to avoid the 5% chance of a clean miss....

My group called that feat the "Fighter's Teleport".

Our GM decided that those rods -- immoveable rods? The ones that you could set anywhere and couldn't move. He decided that from now on in ANY gameworld where those could exist, only one could exist. Ever.

Those, portable holes, and a few other artifacts just got overused as solutions.

I think the game that finally got them banned was the one where I got stuck (I joined late and was given an already existing PC) playing a Holy Avenger who lacked any levels in paladin or cleric, and who rode a skeletal steed because he'd been convinced it was "low maintaince" and would "save on food costs".

Stupidest character ever, and was my introduction to the notion of a truly cursed character. No matter who played him, his rolls sucked. Unless he was rolling on a critical table. Then it was 90s and 100s.

Does every group go through a 'zombie horses' stage?

Nope, never had an undead mount.

Horses eat grass.

If as a DM you want to cut into your adventurer's money a little bit you convince them to do what any other sane person would do if they were fabulously wealthy and known across the land: snort lines of residuum off of a succubi's ass.

I didn't want the skeletal mount. The problem with playing this guy was he was one of two "Hey, someone wants in for a session" PC's so he got played by one (or all) of the regulars when there wasn't anyone to take him. Including levelling. Hence the Holy Avenger with no paladin or cleric levels.

Was a fun campaign anyways, even though this guy had shitty luck and a ridiculous build. Was an Al-Qadim campaign IIRC. We got to make ridiculous epic-level characters for a side-quest, put in there ENTIRELY because the GM wanted to see what we'd do if given random build instructions and told to make them "level 20". (I think the plot was we got randomly switched into these guys, in the past, and had do something to get back? I dunno).

I had a mummy gladiator. It worked out surprisingly well.

Did they "adjust" the rules from the orig 4e where residuum, by all accounts a material that should be the basis for the most stable currency in the world, inexplicably cannot be bought or sold? That was probably one of the most retarded things I read in the entire DMG/PHB.

Now I'm trying to remember what the hell residuum is? Isn't it the magic stuff you get from breaking down magic artifacts? Basically enchant materials?

It's soulbound. ;D

1) that was never a rule

2) who cares if it was?

One day, I'm going to annoy my friends by running a straight-up dungeon crawl with BoP and BoE gear.

"Ah, man, shouldn't have picked up that mace. You're a wizard. Why did you even pick it up? Now you're encumbered. You can either drop half your gear, or leave the 10,000 pp mace to rot on the ground because no one can ever touch it. Ever."

My DM. We had a spirited argument about the illogicality of it :)

I'd have to pull the books out and dig through them, but somewhere my edition it specifically says that it's neither bought nor sold. I guess to prevent PCs from simply transferring their wealth directly into an easily portable, universally valuable substance. Kind of like what converting your gold into gems used to be.

I think the idea of soulbound items are pretty funny though. Though, I believe in games past those were called "Cursed".

Yep, cursed items.  :heart:  And the main reason why every adventurer should never touch anything unidentified without their trusty tongs.  Even if I'm playing newer editions cursed items stay really nasty when I'm DMing, as do artifacts.  I have the complete Encyclopedia Magica from 2nd Edition, and even in 3.5 I often take magic items right out of there and adjust them slightly.  And none of the weaksauce 3.5 artifacts either.  Artifact possession, artifact transformation, indestructibility, all the good stuff that makes an artifact worth putting in your campaign sticks around.  They're not just really powerful magic items.

just checked by PHB. It is mentioned in two places, page 225 and 300.

On page 225 it says that its a convenient way to store large sums of wealth because is so valuable (1 pound=500,000 gp and fits in a belt pouch) and that in some exotic places its traded like currency.

On page 300 it says it can't always be bought on the open market. [nothing about not being able to sell it]

So yea, the PHB encourages you to melt shit down that you won't use and carry it around as residuum to be used for rituals or sold.

Bah. Can't find my 4th ed books. I do have 2 3rd edition d20 and 1 3.5 PHB if anyone wants them.

As I recall, his argument was that if it can't be bought, it can't be sold, and we aren't in any "exotic" lands. This was years ago, of course, all I really remember clearly is us both getting angry :)

RP'ing and managing intelligent (and delusional) items is fun.

Obviously.  I mean, whenever I work far up north my thirst for beer goes away.

guy we played with on the weekend had these:  Thorn Dice Set  (http://www.shapeways.com/model/126260/thorn_dice_set.html?gid=mg). They weren't very functional, since he had to stop and squint to read each roll, but they were neat to look at.  That site has other ones as well.

(http://www.shapeways.com/modules/udesign/utils/openfile.php?id=126260&f=photos/photo17074.jpg)

Now, they have style !

Man, and I thought it hurt to accidentally step on a regular 4-sider.

(http://www.shapeways.com/modules/udesign/utils/openfile.php?id=106205&f=photos/photo17808.jpg)

Caltrop D4 (http://www.shapeways.com/model/106205/caltrop_die4.html?gid=sg25282)

"Handy for rolling for magic missiles or deterring infantry."

Thread semi-derailment:
Anyone have experience with WFRP 3e?  I just put down on a copy of the core set from Amazon (only $60 right now).
I'm not a big fan of the Old World but at that pricepoint I couldnt resist.  Also, I've been working on conversions for some other games that use similar mechanics/ideas, so rather than reinvent the wheel might as well buy into it.

As it relates to DnD4e, I'd always thought WoTc should've presented their product in similar fashion as FFG did for WFRP.  The game requires so much tracking and reference that just having the 4e core books is just  :why_so_serious:   

Are you actually looking to get rid of them?  I haven't been able to find my 3.5 PHB since I moved.  I can consult SRDs and whatnot, but I like having physical books.

Yep. I have no use for them and am moving soon. I'll PM you.

Summoning / pet / familiar rules and options in 4e suck hardcore.  Discuss.

The root of the problem, as I see it, is that 4e combat can take a good amount of time. Any NPCs you throw in the scenario can multiply it. Status effects mean that you have to track stuff on the NPC and that the NPC inflicts on monsters.
Thus, pet effects are usually nerfed hardcore in order to limit that. Like how pets take player actions, and sometimes are not considered really there. Or are horribly simplified.

I dunno if it got better in Essentials, or if it's even addressed.

The more I play 4th ed, the more I miss 2nd.

We gave the new henchmen rules a whirl last session.   These were the rules from the last Dragon issue - basically they use the Companion rules from the DMG2 which makes NPCs with like 3 PC powers and formula-derived hp, attack bonuses, and damage, and PCs control them in combat.  The Dragon magazine additions basically clarify that the henchmen get paid a flat fee per adventure, take no treasure, and suck up a share of XP.  

It was three players/PCs and two henchmen in a session that was basically nothing but combat after combat.  The NPCs didn't seem to slow anything down, and arguably sped things up.  Something around 15 combats in six hours or so.  

With three people, though, it was convenient that often one PC and the associated henchmen would end up being successive in initiative order.  What I can see happening in a larger party, if a player got his PC and henchman's turns separated by a few minutes, is their attention wandering between turns and require some poking with a stick.

Also, the people who make quick decisions got to have control over the henchmen.  I would never give them to a... shall we say deliberate? player.  But the henchmen only having like 3-5 powers does help a ton, and I intentionally gave them simple, simple powers.  The cleric that didn't end up getting used, for example, required a lot of fussing to avoid powers with random status effects and interrupts.  But a Wizard-ish henchman with basically nothing but magic missile and hypnotism can be really fast for a PC to run.

They are much better than other rule sets.

Keeping the action economy in check is a big deal.

Yeah, this isn't magically just a 4e problem.  My group is actively bitching about summoner types in pathfinder right now, because we had two of them in our last campaign, and combat got out of hand and tedious for everyone else.

The only real issue I've noticed is that some things don't scale well (beastmaster ranger pets for example start to have issues with attack bonus in the upper end of paragon tier) but the limited actions really keep the annoying summoner stuff of previous editions in check. The druid summons have their instinctive actions which is a fine way of splitting the difference I think.

Do what proudft did: rebalance the encounter.  Subtract gold/experience or add another hostile.

Or have the monster roll to break free and ruin the summoner's shit. :awesome_for_real:

That has nothing to do with why 3e summoning characters are irritating. They take 3x (or more depending on how much agonizing paging through monster manuals for summons stats is going on) as long as anyone else's turns, their summons are taking up space that other people need to use, they're giant spotlight hogs, etc. It isn't so much a question of game balance for me as it is just that logistically speaking they're fucking irritating as hell to everyone except the person playing them.

Woo, proudft thinks I make quick decisions!

I actively detest those slow ass motherfuckers.  These assholes don't pay attention to shit other than the thumb up their own ass while it's not their turn and then are surprised when people are waiting on them. 

1. Make them print that shit out or they're not allowed to summon it.
2. Decrease the difficulty for summons to break free and ( rampage / go ride bicycles ) depending on how many summons they have out.
3. Use swarm/mob/minion rules when appropriate.
4. Use larger environments.
5. Let friendly players displace summoned pets.

6. Fix it in the next edition.  :awesome_for_real:

So everything should be peachy by the time 5e starts rolling out? :oh_i_see:

There is something like five different systems for controlling the way pets spend action points so far, to little gain.

In the current campaign I'm in, I play a cleric so I've got a summon monster spell I can use but I rarely pick it for anything after the first few uses.  It's annoying to find the stats for the summoned monster each time when I forget to copy over the info from my last player sheet, plus at lower levels the monsters are more annoying than anything else, IMO.

Right now in our DM has the party basically trapped in a city by the most nefarious means possible - economics.  We keep getting randomly portaled to new locations as part of our quest and the most recent one stuck us in a mine filled with goblins and the occasional troll.  We fought our way out of the mountain and went haring off into the wilderness to get away from the gobos and continue on our quest.  He's being really strict on things like encumbrance and food, so seeing a city at the end of a huge long bridge across the extremely wide canyon in our path means we go to the city.  Want to come inside?  Certainly!  Just make sure to sign or mark this agreement that you'll pay the admitance fee (5g each for a party of 10!) and/or agree to pay a 10g fee plus 40% convenience charge per person before you exit the city.  Oh, and no magic AT ALL is allowed here, so make sure to register all your magical items with the magister, get your permits and go through approved channels to sell or buy any supplies.  No money?  We'll be glad to extend a letter of credit (plus % fee) while you're here in the city.  Oh yeah, that agreement you signed?  Is magically enforced and we consider 500 miles of the canyon to be city limits, so don't think about trying to get down there and escape that way.


So right now a few of us are scheming to try to figure out what the DM wants us to do or find before we can leave the city.  We know he planned this out well because we've found absolutely no coin or gems to this point of the campaign (and any loot we've tried to sell is being bought for pennies on the dollar), so we're stuck since the party is good/neutral (chaos isn't allowed - it's part of the storyline).  The wizard and I are contempating letting the barbarian go all conan for griggles and then "accidently" casting a spell of some sort to see what will happen.  If nothing else, I get a new character but the wizard is integral to thw storyline, if she goes campaign is probably over.

In case there are any kids who played 1st ed, I wanted to share these: http://www.otherworld.me.uk/store.html

I'm a sucker for the nostalgia.

I got some of those a few weeks back, haven't painted em yet.  The hezrous & lizardmen are quite a bit smaller than I expected, fyi.   I guess it says the hezrous are 32mm tall right there on the site, but I don't speak metric.   :oh_i_see:

Wow. Those are seriously great. Characterful minis that retain that old school charm.

If I didn't have a table full of projects already, I'd get some.

Amazing casts and even more amazing paint jobs on those.

:awesome_for_real:

I kid somewhat. I really didn't want to get in to this one, because I fully understand why they changed it. Being in a 3.5/PF party with a underprepared guy with a ton of summoning/followers/henchmen is anoying to say the least.

I just don't think that effectively putting your main character in stasis when his pet acts is exactly the solution I was looking for.

It actually works out ok in play, basically everything gets to at least move when you move, and most of the pet-involved powers involve things like 'you make an attack, then your pet does X' sort of things. There's a lot of argument on 4e forums that the beastmaster ranger is underpowered but that is due to power design and scaling, not so much the action economy. The wizard summons are the lamer ones, since they really do burn your actions to do their thing for the most part. Druid summons have an 'instinctive action', which is what they do at the end of your turn if you didn't order them to do something else, which is what they really should have done with the wizard ones. Possibly they'll get errata some day.

Hoooouse Ruuuules!  :drill:

Keep in mind the instinctive actions also have drawbacks half the time. Lots of them are nearest CREATURE, not Enemy, for example.  :why_so_serious:

One of our slowbies is less "wasn't paying attention" and more "wants to make The Most Optimal Choice Possible" and will spend an hour debating the merits of her choice with herself if we let her. She's not very good at just making a snap decision and if it is slightly less than awesome in its result, oh well. The other slow guy just ... really likes to think. And think. And think. But then we start making suggestions. So he has to think about those. And then we make more, which is totally not actually helpful, etc. Proudft forbade us from talking during his turn a couple of times.  :grin:

I miss that guy. His wife had some babies and he disappeared. Stupid babies!

Um, the wizard and druid ones are pretty much the only ones of note. What else even has a summons, the binder has a massive two powers over 30 levels?

Artificer has plenty. Well, "plenty" for the number of total powers it has thanks to being forgotten about :(

Oh right, them. Their stuff goes into the same 'early stuff' bucket as the wizard, really.

They didn't even get into arcane power.  :cry:

Well given they came out 2 months after Arcane Power that should hardly be a surprise.  :-P

That's just poor planning.

Ranger, Wizard, Druid, Artificer, Shaman, and Invoker have pets/summons of varying use.  One Psion paragon path has a summon that works like the druid ones.  Anything that can take the Familiar feat can get a pet that has a few niche uses.  Thematically speaking Warlocks and Sorcerers probably should have the capacity to summon shit, but don't.

They probably should have settled on a set of rules for core gameplay before shipping books.

Also, my opinion concerning magically controlled NPC's:

1. The actual control of the NPC is given to a second player.
2. Player(1) gets to dictate instructions, player(2) carries them out in whatever way seems appropriate for a magically dominated NPC.
3. If player(1) doesn't make up their damn mind, player(2) gets to act independently.  Either they continue to carry out the last order, or they do something else "helpful".
4. The results of saving throws to break domination are between the DM and player(2).  Neither are allowed to tell or signal that the domination is breaking.
5. The reward for the player actually controlling the Balor is knowing when to slowly back away.

There's no reason for the ranger/sentinel pets to function like the shaman spirit, nor the arcane familiar, nor like the druid/wizard/invoker/artificer daily summons. They serve different purposes. The rules for all of them are really not terribly complicated, either.

Erm, there is totally a reason for the ranger pets to behave like the druid ones: they're both beasts.

So, off the top of your head, what's the rule for a mage wizard summon you want to open a door?  Simple enough, right? :oh_i_see:

EDIT: Curses!

EDIT2: While we're at it, how do you get the summon to then walk through the door and attack something?

One is a daily summons, the other one is a permanent pet. They're not functionally similar in role at all.

Off the top of my head, actual summons (as in things that are summoned by powers with the summoning keyword) can't take any actions that aren't specified in the power, except for moving when you burn a minor action to order them. So no opening doors unless the power says so.

If you want to have this slapfight we should probably not shit up the general interest thread, though.

The role is completely different, but that doesn't mean you need to dictate a completely new set of rules for basic control of that creature.

Anyways, point being: if you have to look it up to be certain they really haven't done that good a job at simplifying it, have they?  It's just that now instead of looking up stat blocks you're now looking up whether you and your Gaping Maw can walk through the door you opened and still have an action point to toss a spell.

EDIT: By the way, the above example can't be done by a summoner wizard, but a beast master ranger can.

EDIT2: And I've more or less said my piece.  We can now move on to how shaman spirits take damage. :why_so_serious:

EDIT3: And if proudft starts installing doors in every dungeon room and corridor when somebody is playing a summoner wizard or druid don't blame me.

Shaman Spirits are pretty complex in their interactions. Did you know they can hover?

You probably should not get me started. :oh_i_see:  Seriously though, I didn't.  I wouldn't be surprised if there were other things I was missing as well, though I'm wondering where you found that bit since the PHB2's stat block on shaman summons is... nonexistent.

Some light reading: http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/22949629/Shaman_Spirit_Companion_FAQ     :oh_i_see:

The shaman spirit is a conjuration, not a summons, so it doesn't need a stat block!

The only real problem is the HP threshold to kill it scales badly at higher level. Should be getting +1 per level instead of +1/2 per level to scale appropriately with the new monster math.

Only if you don't mind your DM Googling it while you wait to know whether you conjuring it in midair causes  :awesome_for_real: or :uhrr:!

I really dig the shaman spirit mechanic, they just need to give con shamans a way to get actual AC.

You just like it because a level 1 shaman can run his spirit into a room full of Kobolds, hide by the door, and watch it go about it's grim business, don't you? :awesome_for_real:

It doesn't actually have any attacks of it's own technically!

Do the shaman powers that result in the spirit attacking reveal the shaman?  I believe we need a rules lawyer here.

Yes, since the spirit never attacks, the shaman attacks with the target square/range being the spirit.


Unless of course the shaman has some other means of preventing reveal upon attacking, few feats like that.

Dredging this back up, because summon/conjuration argument brought me to the Wizards of the Coast forums, which is delightful.

WotC:  Hey dudes, Guess what?  We've got vampires!  Unbreathing, unaging, bloodthirsty undead that take sun damage!  Pack a cloak!  Isn't this shit awesome?
DM: Yes, but if they're wearing a heavy cloak how do I use it to kill players? (http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/27621437/How_do_you_exploit_the_sunlight_weakness_for_Vampires_in_combat?pg=1)

Also, I thought I saw something somewhere that the shaman spirit is considered the source of the attack, will investigate further.

Lovely take on the how "How to I fuck my paladins into being fighters with no bonus feats" in the thread there. :)

Then again, my DM's wanted a player to have a strict code -- not necessarily adhere to one in a book. Falling as a Paladin was rather difficult if you played even remotely to alignment.

Still, a cloak hmm....hope it's fireproof. It'd suck for the vampire race to be really screwed from the fireballs eating their cloak.

Magical Burkas!  :awesome_for_real:

How often do you normally 'burn away' a non-vampires clothing after a fireball?

Are they good looking and have resist fire? :drill:

This one is pretty good too. (http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/27622757/I_lost_my_legs)

That one is just  :uhrr: mostly.

If a comely lass is murdered in the woods, and nobody is around to witness it, does a paladin fall?

I'd really like to try DM'ing a game with paladin code rules, and set him up for a fall in order to see if I could convince a paladin into thinking that he's fallen without actually doing anything mechanics-wise to the character.  Cruelty is ever so much more fun if you can convince the player to inflict it upon themselves.

Practically all the time. It's just no one tracks it, for the most part, figuring you'll replace cloaks or -- if it's magical -- it's assumed to have the general magic item resistance.

A pushy GM might make you roll for each item, although mine only tends to do that for non-magic items when dealing with acid attacks.

It's just having a cloak there that's all that prevents you from sunny death is just begging for people to attack the cloak, which seems a lot easier than getting a stake through the heart.

You know, rip down the convienent curtains rather than stake Dracula.

Not sure how it works in 4E, but in 3.5 items are only affected by AOEs if the wearer rolls a natural 1 on his save.

Also, in 3.5, that's when they removed a lot of additional spell effects. "fireball" as 3.5/4 describes it doesn't produce any concussive forces and can't blow open doors, and our GM described it as a weird supernatural globe of heat that just appears, envelops instantly, and does no more than the precise wording in the PHB. Basically his opinion was that it's magic and so it doesn't have to follow any laws, much less the laws of physics. So if the book doesn't specifically say it burns something than it doesn't burn it.

Then again, this ruling was to prevent us from doing odd/interesting/inventive things from the different spells. We had used things like portable holes and that one rod that stays where you leave it to devastating effect in the past, so I don't exactly blame him. Still, I think the writers thought the same way and the spell descriptions are very careful to lay out exactly what spells can and cannot do. There's no extrapolation or open ended abilities. It's part of what I mentioned before, the narrowing of effects. Thus, fireballs don't burn cloaks.

IMO the 'fireball doesn't hurt attended objects' rule is more or less a necessary one from a sanity perspective. It would become ludicrous very quickly trying to track item damage on every piece of everyone's gear.

Can you elaborate?  :grin:

These are precisely the things that make D&D and other tabletop RPG's particularly fun for me; without them, I feel as though I may as well be playing a computer game.  4th Edition in particular strongly feels like a push toward 'you can only do X, because that's all the rules say you can do' rather than 'you can do anything you want unless it is prohibited by the rules, and we have to figure out what your odds are' but as noted with Fireball, there was already a move in that direction with 3rd Edition.

Well the alternative is that you could never have scrolls drop as loot (and they comprise a significant portion of minor magic items) if the very person who could use them would be accidentally destroying them every battle. I love flavorful spells as much as the next guy, but if Fireball actually caught everything on fire it's usefulness would be greatly reduced in many combat encounters.

Scrolls are often contained in scroll cases, which may or may not be flammable.  A simple, tin, cylindrical scroll case should be enough to survive a flash burst fireball.  Personally I used a jedi-handwave saying that the indicated target takes primary damage, and only easily combustible materials (grain dust, oil, loose tinder, etc) are in danger of being affected beyond obtaining a singed adjective. 

I remember when fireballs had volume and woe to the unprepared (or the foes of the prepared) who cast one in a hallway. :cry:

I kinda miss that about the older versions.

Then again, it wasn't quite as bad back then if some of your equipment got blown up.  People weren't running around with a very specific set of magical gear designed to work with an optimized feat selection. 

That's not to say that people weren't attached to their +3 arrows of gazebo-slaying, but you could easily substitute in whatever junk you found.  Hell, most of the gear we used was whatever we scrounged up, not what we'd purchased at the local Mage-Mart.

I was usually lenient and allowed magic arrows/bows and that sort of thing to survive conflagration. But while I wasn't an encumbrance nazi, I did push hard for realistic load-carrying. A bag of holding was probably the most sought-after magic items in my campaigns. I also found it to make for more interesting role-playing, when fighters were worried about what a hilt was wrapped with because they had had a leather wrapping burned off their first sword (wire wrapped hilts became popular).

But I was never really about the rules, which is why the constant revisions turned me off. The new system sounds awful. NWN2 turned me off with all the options and feats and whatnot. Probably better for a video game, but a waste of time (imo) for pen & paper where you just need some basic guidelines.
Do lightning bolts still reflect off the end of a hall? Always fun to have a mage with low wisdom who forgets to estimate the length of a hall before letting loose the lightning.

Our GM uses a standard "If it's very flammable, it catches on fire" rule -- like, for instance, fireballing the room full of Web or grease. (Someone in our party tossed a fireball THROUGH an fireplace that connected two rooms -- so it'd explode in the OTHER room, killing hte guys there before they could rush through the door. It blew up the wall, because the 'other room' was where they were boiling oil for the castle defenses...).

For people, the GM is of the mind that someone only catches on fire from a bad reflex save, and even then you can just choose to drop and roll. Item damage only occurs if you ignore the fact that you're on fire to keep fighting.

Acid's a bit different, since the "drop to the dirt and roll" response is hugely ineffective.

Mostly damage from fireballs and the like is purely cosmetic, but he's got some good rule of thumb stuff for things like "I want to use my spell to do X" -- he's fond of creative uses of things. I think a good GM knows when to bother with such things, and when just to handwave it as flavor.

I'm interested in suggestions regarding the targeting of those AoE spells, from a DM standpoint.

Specifically, it bothers me when the finger-wagglers start fussing over the placement of something like a fireball.  One, it bogs things down.  Two, they expect pinpoint precision on the placement when they're shooting at a particular point in space, often in poor visibility, usually through a pack of enemies and allies, so that they can always have optimal effect.  Yes, hitting the most enemies possible while minimizing friendly fire is a good thing, but I'd like there to be at least a little challenge to it.

Templates would help the first part, but not the second.  I'd like to implement some sort of "to hit" roll for targetting under such circumstances; or are there any other ideas? 

Or am I just being too picky?

Yeah, you don't want to nerf fireballs by saying they light everything on fire, but I don't like the gooniness of saying they don't set things on fire evar.

Plus, fire is how you get rid of giant spider webs!  :drill:

From a 3.5e standpoint, rolling to hit a square with a throwing weapon is a ranged touch attack with AC 10. You could use that as a starting point, modifying the AC of the square based on conditions (lighting, visibility due to cover, etc). You could also require them to target the fireball ON a particular mob (although then you run into issues with hitting the mob, where it explodes if you miss, etc.). The other issue is that if you miss your target square, you'd need another roll to see where it ended up which just brings things back to "bogged down". It also servers as a nerf to one of the biggest strengths of magic users, and the best source of AOE damage. The easier solution would probably be to stop sending huge packs of enemies at your party if it's such a big deal, or use creatures that surround your party (flanking, tumble, etc) so that AOE spells are guaranteed to hit the PCs as well.

Requiring to hit rolls for effects that already allow saving throws puts them into double jeopardy territory, not a fan of the idea personally.

I would disagree with that one. One is pre-effect and the other is post-effect (seeing whether the effect affects, if you will). I'd rather have that than some kind of pinpoint accuracy where a wizard somehow knows the exact point of effect and the exact fringes of said effect (unless he's got a 19+ Int, I guess!).

My regular GM usually used a spellcraft or concentration check to do pinpoint accuracy. Mostly spellcraft, the general justification being that if you wanted the AoE to go off in exactly the right point you'd have to bring to mind all the elements of the spell, your experience and understanding with it, and use that to place it. We looked into ranged touch attacks (like rays) but decided all you needed was LoS for things like fireballs.

Doing that in combat is a bit iffy, but we handwaved it as being "very familiar with the mannerisms of that spell" with a hint of "magical intent". Spellcraft was just a check to see if you knew the spell well enough to place it for maximum effect.

I think the base check was a 15 for standard "put it in the right spot not to fry my teammates" in combat. Concentration checks required if you were being threatened (in addition to the one to cast in combat anyways).

What I mean is it gives the spell two chances to fail where most effects in the game only have one chance to fail. Either you get a save against it, or you need to roll to hit with it, not both (there are some rare exceptions). That takes what is already typically a fairly suboptimal choice for a wizard in 3.5 (vanilla damage area spells) and makes it relatively that much worse compared to the big save-or-lose spell effects. It isn't a good call balance-wise in other words.

It also probably won't speed anything up, since adding an extra mechanic to resolve on top of the player finding the right spot to target something in the first place isn't going to make it faster.

 :oh_i_see:

That doesn't solve his issue of getting annoyed at the player taking too long to figure out where to center the burst. (Not that I think there exists a rules solution for that sort of thing that won't just end up making it worse somehow.)

I play 3.5/pathfinder, not 4e.  I can't remember what "Area burst 3 within 20 squares" is supposed to mean.

Otherwise, to clarify, time is less the issue than "I want to use a spell that makes a big-ass fire burn this monster, but not the person it's engaged in melee with, 100% of the time without fail"

I use an "oops you missed" house rule for teleportation in this campaign.  It does add time, but I clearly spelled out in the campaign rules that teleportation was unreliable, and they live with the consequences of the occasional misfire.  Or, should I say, they've lived so far....  The party ranger once got lazy and asked the bard to dimension door the two of them to the top of a cliff; they wound up 200' above it instead  :grin:

Now that I think about it, the two of them have an amazing propensity for somehow falling long distances.

I find that players find lots of ways to fail on their own without needing to add more ways for the dice to fuck them in the name of realism. YMMV.

1st edition. It's all I've played, though I've got the core books for 2nd and 3rd.

Yeah in 1e that stuff is king since monsters have so many fewer hit points. (And the adventures tend to have things like a room full of 57 trolls.)

I'm not sure why using fireball to target one monster while avoiding one PC in melee is such a huge deal. However, the easier fix would be to simply change your encounters rather than monkeying around with mechanics to nerf magic users.

It's not that much of a problem, or shouldn't be.  I like players who use spells creatively--it offers me at least as much chance to get even with them as it causes me troubles.  The ranger I mentioned who regularly falls from heights?  He once had water walking on, to float above the water to evade a monster's tremorsense.  A few rounds later he found himself falling into the ocean, thinking he was going to get the damage cut by falling into water--forgetting that his water walking spell would cause him to come to a sudden halt just above the water's surface  :grin:

What irks me is when they treat the fireball as solution to all problems.  I sometimes get sick of the answer to the question "what are you going to do" being "do I have any fireballs left?  Oh yeah, I cast fireball".  Or whatever the spell is, it isn't just fireball.

Edit:  I guess it does bother me a little bit that they never misplace one.  Melee fighters miss.  Archers miss, and really their arrows should go somewhere but I understand letting that sort of slide.  A few inches off with a 40' globe of fire?  Seems like that could fuck someone's day over pretty good.

20 square range, 3 square radius.  I was more hinting at the fact that another game system already has you roll to hit with fireball, hence:  :oh_i_see:

Use a hex grid and a set of divider calipers.

Melee characters miss, archers miss, monsters save vs fireball (or whatever the spell is). There are very few things in the game that don't require any check at all to land, but in 3.5e rules avoiding AOEs is a reflex save not a to-hit roll. As Ingmar said above, there are few mechanics in the game that allow two chances to miss.

There's a variant in one of the splat books (Unearthed Arcana maybe; the details can be found here on the SRD (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/adventuring/playersRollAllTheDice.htm)) that, among other things, allows casters to roll the enemy saving throws. You could implement that, and allow the usual caveat of "Player rolls a natural 1 and bad/hilarious things happen."

I think what some of you may be focusing on is allowing the fireball to miss the monsters.  That's not the case, and would rarely happen even if the player's aim was a few feet off. I'm happy if the player is able to hit all 66 gnolls in that room in the demonweb pits with one blast.  I'm not trying to nerf the mages.

What I miss is the possibility of the trigger-happy mage having to explain to the slightly singed party meatshield why their aim wasn't just six more inches to the left.....

Well, that's what I mean about letting the players find their own ways to fail, though. Adding a random element to AOE targeting is another tick in the pile of random events that can lead to a TPK or whatever.

If you really want to do it though just require an attack roll or spellcraft check to hit the target square, and use the grenade-like weapon scatter rules if they miss.

I like having a few random events--but if I were to implement it, it would have to be a common enough occurence for people not to feel unfairly singled out when it happened, but rare enough to be interesting.

I'm not sure where to set the chances for that to be the case, so I doubt I'll actually do it.  Plus, general consensus seems to be against it. 

Thanks for the feedback :)

Our mages solved the targeting problem by always aiming near me.  Fortunately I had good saves, and she often fried herself, too, but optimal targeting never slowed us down...

That was the focus of an OOTS comic. Aim at the paladin with the monk evasion skill.

We had a wizard once that (I think there was some home-brew in there, since 3.5 doesn't support exactly what he did) was nasty with on-the-fly shaped spells and energy substituted spells, but that did bog the game down.

More the shaping than anything else, until the GM just made or bought some shaped cutouts and would dump them on the mat.

Not necessarily home-brew; there's prestige classes & feats that do everything but give you a hand-job while reducing your opponents to component atoms.  I know the Archmage prestige class gets some ability to shape, but I think it's limited to making unaffected exclusion zones in a spell's area; I think there's metamagic for turning one shape into another as well.

Evasion?  Ha!  This was a 2nd edition game.  Half damage at best, though I did get a frostbrand at some point which provided a bit of protection.

I'm going to reiterate this point, just because: hexes are massively superior to a square grid when you need to handle distances.

Also, I can't find whatever it was that made me think that shaman spirits were considered the source of the attack.

But massively inferior for drawing dungeons on!

That's what they want you to believe.  Open your eyes brother, and see the truth!

Can you buy hex paper?

Yes.  You can also use offset-square grids, which tends to be easier for drawing dungeons/castles (you just have to decide if a half-square can still be occupied).

--Dave

Hexes forever!  Dungeons get a little odd, but are workable.  Overland and in open areas it's far superior.

He was some weird-ass sorcerer hybrid with a severely limited (even for sorcerer's) spell selection, but gained metamagic feats and a lot of flexibility on the +spell level stuff in return. He also had a somewhat reduced spell-per-day as well -- closer to a wizard than a sorcerer.

Basically the guy had exactly ONE spell per spell level, period. That's all he could ever learn. So at level 20, the guy would know 9 spells. The thing was he could apply metamagic on the fly to them without as much of a penalty.

It seemed to balance out in play, or he never figured out how to massively exploit it, since he seemed to get knocked around about the same as us and do about the normal sort of ass-kicking as a sorcerer his level. It was a fun concept, and the guy played it as being a hedge-mage of some sort that had an 'instinctive understanding' of magic, so he was more about flexibility and clever application.

His third level spell was STILL fireball, however. :) I can't say for sure, but i'd bet his first level one was magic missile. :)

SHE'S A WITCH!

BUUUURN HEEEER!

(http://wiki.rpg.net/images/9/97/Scarlet_Witch.jpg)

More like a warlock than a sorceror then...interesting.

It was, actually. We were encouraged to try out unusual (at least for us) characters. Our regular cleric went with a Yoda-like Drunken Master of some small race I can't remember, although he was still pretty much into peace, harmony, and healing until he got plastered.

I went as a Priest of Thoth (only one in the land -- we handwaved a distant land of Egyptians I had been forcibly kidnapped from) and started a church (IE: Took leadership!) and modeled the character after Daniel Jackson from SG-1 -- desert robes and getting lost in strange books or ancient ruins -- very much about knowledge and understanding. Quite a change from my normal dex-monkeys.

Plus, I got to use creepy magic, strange rituals, that sort of thing. Mostly just flavor stuff rather than anything binding, but it was fun to be basically viewed with skepticism, alarm, or outright hostility by clerics from every religion under the sun. Worshipped the wrong God, and was gaining followers....

The biggest change to DND (IMO) is the internet and printers. A google search for "hex paper" and a printer and you're good to go.

Not so much the DDI system, which is clownshoes.

Math-wise offset squares are identical to a hex grid.


Hexes make for good natural caves.  Just tell your players the rock has 60° cleavage angles.

No Sky, once is enough.

can anyone recommend a good site for RPG's like Boardgamegeek?  RPG.net isn't that robust.  Looking for more lists, recommendations, etc.

DM: "I want to saw off the ranger's legs and use her as a sex toy, is there rules for that?" (http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/27681653/I_have_the_plot,_but_cant_find_the_rules.)

 :ye_gods:

Technically, legs are not actually required to walk in 4e.  :why_so_serious:

Or to equip footwear.

I just don't know why the hell you'd do that, then hand-wave it away with a ritual right after.

He isn't DMing a game, he's writing fan fiction for himself.


It's not hard to explain really.

Too railroady.

But why render it moot then?

I'd totally take the opportunity to screw with the players a little if their character was pretty much at an end because they were being retarded.  I'd blind a melee combatant just so I could give him blindsight later.  Or maiming a character just to give them warforged limb(s).  Or inflicting the character with undeath or lycanthropy.  Or being impersonated/dominated by a doppleganger, dryad, devil, demon, ghost, mind flayer, aboleth, shadow, oni, hag, impersonator mimic, lamia, raavasta, or rakshasa and subsequently the same character just randomly "reappearing" without explanation. :awesome_for_real:

Rpggeek?

thank you /shamed

You're asking me to make logical sense of someones fan fiction!  :why_so_serious:

Should we get WUA in here then? :oh_i_see:

I'm sort of curious, do you know any good reasons why there are only small/medium races?  The official word is apparently "balance", but going from medium to large is only worth on average .5 damage to |W|, and there are feats at level one that do more than that.

Reach.

Large creatures are a the 2x2 mini as well, no? That fucks with the balance of bursts and shit on top of reach issues.

Yep. There's also a bit of carryover from 3e/3.5e where being large was an automatic +4 strength, so there weren't many large PC races lying around in the "need to convert this pile" when 4e started, really.

Out of curiousity, does 4E have something like the ECL system? I ran a few games where we started at level 4 or 5 mostly to open up ECL classes. (That and with experienced players, I tend to find level 5ish being a fun starting point in general, at least in 3 and 3.5).

No, nothing like that in 4e. There's no such thing as racial hit dice anymore either.

That kinda sucks. You can have a lot of fun playing with a group that includes things like half-giants, pixies, centaurs and the like.  ECL was pretty cludgy, but it worked well enough.

There are all kinds of wacky races still, the idea is that they're just all balanced - so a drow vs. an elf isn't a situation where the drow is just a billion times better, necessitating an ECL adjustment. Race writeups are entirely separate from monster writeups, monsters are just built individually rather than taking a race and adding class levels or whatever. It works out well in practice.

Large creatures can be reach 1.


I don't see why that would be an issue either.  Sure, if you had a close burst 1 with no target cap you can crunch 12 creatures rather than the usual 8. (There aren't any melee reach close bursts, are there?)  But realistically that's not going to happen unless some of them are minions, and you know what?  Fuck em', minions are there to be crunched.

Also, the reciprocal is possible too.  Getting flanked by 8 trolls would fucking suck.

My DM asked everyone to bring him copies of our character sheets to our game tonight.  Should I be worried?  :grin:

Odds of party being captured and stripped of their gear rising!

Or he's making doppleganger versions of each character and he's going to co-opt players into being fifth columnists.

If it were my game I'd take each person aside one by one, assign each a doppleganger, and give all of them the mission of covertly sabotaging the party.  For the lulz.

Then after the intermission I'd cut to the dungeon as the players, stripped of their gear, are arriving one by one as prisoners of separate parties of dopplegangers.

You know, that would be hilarious and fun to try doing.  There is one guy would absolutely excel at doing that and he'd enjoy it all the way to the bank.  Luckily he's playing a barbarian this time around instead of a rogue type, not that him causing chaos is lessened by his character choice.

The DM definitely has plans for us and now that things have started moving again, it should be fun.  The party has been stuck in the only town around for miles because of bad luck and economy.  It's situated next to a huge gorge (think Grand Canyon) which is filled with gems and other loot but guarded by "dragons".  This had the net result of skewing their economy severely, meaning we ran into "Oh, you'd like dinner tonight?  No problem, that'll be 400 gold.  Each." all over the place.  So we've been waylaid from our quest and just started on a mission into the gorge to protect miners and we've had our first glimpse of the "dragons" in there.  Tonight will be fun.

Best way might be to get the players attempting The Great Escape while their dopplegangers are out in the world at large performing shenanigans, with the implication that the prison break is in the past and the doppleganger FUBAR is the present, when in actuality it's the other way around.  Plus, once you free the players you can have angry mobs try to burn them.

Maybe he wanted to have a copy so he could make pretty copies using Wizards' tools.

Usually its just so that the DM can take note of what you have, make plans on the sort of things you might need, and being able to point out that you are currently carrying around 485 lbs of equipment. With 12 strength.

I'm pretty sure it's to make sure he knows what everyone has.  Plus he's been strict on the encumbrance rules as well.  And this DM isn't as harsh on us as a previous one used to be, where asking for a copy of our sheets was a guarantee your character was about to die.

I'm having a blast with my current Pathfinder character. He's basically a goblin version of Belkar. Rogue 4/Ranger 2 duelweilding/throwing dagger specialist. It's amazingly easy to sneak attack things to death when my partner, a rotund drunken monk, spends all his actions judo throwing mosters in to a prone and flanked position between us. There are other party members, but we mostly ignore them.

I tried something similar with a friend. Backstory of two soldiers, legionaire-style shield-companions. Basic fighters, some well chosen feats (and a few realistic, if custom ones) -- taken apart, we were shit fighters. Togther, we were a mini-fucking shield wall, or one guy with a big-ass shield and another with a spear.

It was a pretty good balance, actually, since if combat split us apart we went from "effectively untouchable machines of death" to "clumsy targets"

Edited to add: Specifically, we were overpowering working in tandem. When we couldn't, which the GM tried to make happen all the time, we generally got the shit knocked out of us. Was fun to play brothers like that (yes, actual brothers) and absolutely HAVE to cooperate and trust totally another player to be useful. Led to some fun moments where it was very much self-sacrificing to protect your partner.

The party ranger got himself captured by the enemy last night and decided to make a new character rather than staging a rescue.  Problem is, he wound up with three different character concepts he couldn't decide amongst, so he wants to try a "split personality" character (he admitted to having been watching United States of Tara.)

Personality 1 is a cleric/stormlord.
Personality 2 is a ronin, who also thinks he's female.
Personality 3 is a reaping mauler.
He also added 4th personality, which is a 12th level aristocrat (NPC class.)

The idea is that he wants to roll randomly each day to see which personality/class is in effect.   Each will have different feats and skill points, only accessible by the active personality.  His maximum hp will change based on which class he is on a given day.  His armor will work for all four classes, but his weapons or other gear may not--there's enough overlap between classes I don't think I need to worry about him getting undergeared.  The cleric prays for spells, so he'll still be able to pick them up on days he's active.

It sounds interesting, so long as he's fully prepared with all four characters at all times so it doesn't turn into a bookeeping nightmare, and I'm inclined to let him give it a try.  

Any potential pitfalls y'all can think of that need to be addressed?

*edit: four characters, not 3 :P  math is hard, Barbie...

I ran a game for awhile where one of the PCs did the split personalities thing.  It was a big pain in the ass to handle, and that was with only two to deal with.  I personally decided to never allow it or anything like it again in any games I was running, and I'd honestly not be too thrilled to have to deal with it if it was a party member either. 

I don't see the problem - just make him handle all the bookkeeping and come with all 4 character sheets updated each session.

What would be MORE interesting is if you forced each personality to level separately.  :evil:

As a DM, thats the only way I would allow that. Player has to keep track of xp each encounter and level each "personality" seperately.

Also Bunk, from here on out, nothing but huge spiders and snakes for you guys. no more tripping!!

I was going to add more details about what type of tag team manuevers we have planned, but then remembered that you read this board...

That's essentially the same as not allowing it, since the character would fall behind pretty rapidly and be unable to meaningfully contribute.

I think it is a pretty silly idea anyway, though, and shows something of a misunderstanding of how mental illness works besides.  :-P

I think it'll only work if y'all are huge into RP, and don't mind the headaches it will cause.  Though all of them being unusual classes also makes me rub my temples at the imagined headache.

Yea, it will be tough. I'm having a hard enough time with being a Goblin that's pretending to be a Dwarf that got turned in to a Goblin.

Cheap version: He's only actually one class, he just hallucinates being the others and just thinks he has their skills/powers/etc.

It has the potential for hilarity, but are the others going to tolerate him being not just useless 3/4 of the time but potentially an actual detriment?  (I don't know your group.  Some places it works, some it doesn't.)

I was reading a book, and the following line (about the main character, whom you later learn is almost an avatar of the God of Destruction), which went roughly "You leave her [the main character] alone, and when you come  back you'll find her in the smoking rubble of  your homelands, looking apologetic".

We're looking at a new game soon, and the idea of playing a character who -- despite being incredibly lawful good -- can't help but sow utter chaos in his wake is rather interesting. The GM likes the idea of a character who is destined, practically, to stumble into plots, old mysteries, hidden secrets -- and whose solutions tend to leave chaos, fire, and anarchy despite the best intentions in the world.

Not sure we can make it work, stick to a believable lawful good alignment, and still play the whole "I sense weakness/lies/impurity and my first instinct is to destroy it" and have it work.

Simple version.

Have the people you help out do terrible horrible things. The Paladin saves the Kingdom from a terrible Dragon! But the Dragon was able to wreak havoc on a neighboring kingdom's army and now the Kingdom you saved has become a bit "opportunistic"

There's plenty of evil that a Lawful Good character can do "For the greater good".

The idea of the kinds of character you guys are describing is interesting but I don't think they're really practical as player characters. They'd make more sense to me as NPCs under the direct control of the DM.  As player character I think they'd suck up a ridiculous amount of the DM's attention and in the case of the chaos-cursed Paladin would have vastly more power over the game world than any of the other player characters.  In my experience situations like that don't make for happy gamers.

I know you're referring to Simond's version, but just to comment this guy isn't even our first "split personality", although the guy who did it before was a cleric who kept pretending to be clerics of any deity except his own.  We've also had shit like the hippie werebear pirate, the dire werewolf "detective", the awakened parrot thrallherd complete with pirate thrall so he'd have a shoulder to ride around on, the pixie monk, the awakened horse tattooed monk, the lizardfolk wu-jen who'd enlarge himself to godzilla size, the "glam-pire", the gold dragon reaping mauler...

We're mostly ok with "odd."  

Yeah, I'm just looking more for 'unintended consequences' which really puts a massive burden on the GM to alter things on the fly. The other "character idea" I had was for the GM to create a character for me, give it to me as "you're suffering massive amnesia" and gaining a level is a mix between 'remembering' and 'what I've done'.

Not as much Planescape Torment as it sounds, as I mostly am thinking "Here's some stats, a skill or two based off your level that is basically "shit you  might spontaneously remember when pressured" and a bagfull of gear that I have no idea what it is, how it works, and whether it's important.

Other than class and character skills ("Am I smart? Strong? Do I appear to be able to move things with my minds? What's this shiny, glowy silver wand in my pack? Why does it buzz when I flip the button?"), I can just play confused and flail around, and let the GM handle leveling.

You could play the Chaos Paladin as having crazy stuff happen when he rolls a 1 or 2....or even a 20.  :grin:

Ah, cool then.  A group that tolerates the weird stuff is fun.

Just by myself I've had a bunch of 'memorable' characters.  Some of the things my group comes up with make them look boring.  But we've been gaming together for almost twenty years.

In combat or in terms of RP stuff?

RP stuff. Plot development, that sort of thing. Kinda of a more amusing "Road to hell is paved with good intentions" sort of thing. Agent of Destruction is one way of putting it, but Agent of Change is another. The Create/Preserve/Destroy concept works pretty simply -- destruction come in, wiping away the old (with Preservation keeping anything 'good') and then Creation rebuilds.

Without the other two, the character's just a font of chaos. Killing off the evil ruler and coming back a year later to find the country is run by, I dunno, a congolomerate of theives because they were the only ones willing to step up and try to keep the kingdom running, meaning I'm dodging assasins and living some weird Ankh-Morpork world trying to figure out what happened to the lovey kingdom of artisans and philosophers I'd freed from their cruel ruler.

An Agent of Change and Destruction.  So, Chaotic Evil. :-P

NPC Inquisitors and Avengers hunting you because of your uncanny (bad) luck.  Make them do anything to get at the player, and make any friendly NPC townspeople attempt to stop the assassination/execution.

I'm trying to goad some friends into playing 4e again and Skyping me in. If it happens, I'd really like to give the Avenger a try - pretty awesome from what I remember demoing once.

To my fellow DMs, what's your DMing style? When I was younger (and mostly a player) our games were mostly sandboxes; we'd start play with a map and some backstory and just go do whatever based on our character concepts. Nowadays I'm finding that as I DM, my players (some who I've been playing with for years, others who are newish to P&P games) prefer a more directed experience. Throwing them out there with "Ok you're in this town, what do you want to do?" has them bored and starting trouble, while running a scripted campaign (complete with questgivers, breadcrumbs, etc.) seems to grab their attention better.

Generally, I try to sandbox things, but make sure there's an obvious goal.  Build the world, build a conflict that the players have to resolve, build a bunch of situations and characters which could help or hinder the quest, and let the players chose their direction.  As long as you have a sufficiently strong overall goal for the players, it keeps things moving, keeps players from feeling railroaded, and is more fun for me as a GM (I enjoy coming up with characters and situations more than I enjoy meticulously designing encounters and loot tables and so on).

I've never been able to get scripted quests to work.  Someone always pooches something beyond revocery, and then I'm stuck making shit up off the top of my head again anyway.  So you end up with this epic intro and building tension and everything goes great and then there's a snap and the campaign reels around chaotically for a session or two until it begins to sputter out weakly.  It leaves everyone with a bad taste in their mouths.

Linear has it's uses. If you don't give the players some structure, they can't make meaningful choices in what their character do.

The beginning of a campaign is the best place for a script. That way the players have clear goals. Then, as you say, during the session, you sprinkle in hooks and leads, treasure maps, NPCs with problems, etc to give them options on what they'd like to do. Major branches and choices are best placed at the end of a session, so you have time to flesh out the choice they made between sessions.

The Alexandrian has gone into some detail about adventure structures. I'm finding his stuff pretty useful.

http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/prep-scenario.html

I'm pretty linear myself (and prefer linear). Gaming time as an adult is limited enough that I don't want to have those 8 hour sessions that consist entirely of discussions about what we should be doing anymore.

I like options, but the GM being able to put enough breadcrumbs out there is important.  Thankfully my DM of many years fits this style.  He has a meta-plot going on in the region and lets us stumble across clues.

Our latest game is an example.  We had the cliched beginning of being caravan guards.  Kobold attacks had been happening so they hired extra muscle.  Cue one of the bridges we passed having kobolds that salted the water to let a sahaugin survive there.  Then we find out about rival trading companies.  After making the round trip, we find a similar thing happening in the sewers of the dwarven outpost we were in.  We go investigate, and find enough evidence to convince the authorities to let us enter a warehouse.  The rival company had been selling burial artifacts of a nearby culture and had tons of salt stockpiled.  We enter the sewers to find more sahaugin, a partially-submerged grow operation, and us barely stopping a ritual to summon a water elemental... only the other dwarves checking out the other sewers weren't as fast and we came out to find the town devastated.

He gave us clues, but there were any of three obvious different directions we could go from there, along with several sub-hints, or the option to do something else completely.  We ended up doing one, sending messengers in a different direction, then diverting to the third.  He had ideas for the overall scheme plotted out though, so he was able to wing it from there.

There's a range of options between railroad and lost in the woods. :)

I hate linearity (When I use it I feel bad) because I feel that choice and concequences is the only thing that distinguises PnP RPGs from computer ones.

If I dont go for Sandboxey then I usually lean towards pre-written plot-point campaigns if I can (Savage Worlds does this well).  But in the end, freestyle is the way to go imo.  It has the benefits of truly writing your own stories (as you go) and also, if you feel so inclined, you can sell an original module when you're done.

Though, D&D (at least 3.5-4e) isnt really designed for truly Freewheeling play imo.  This is why I scoff at those who ask me about systems before they even decide on style.

Thanks for the link, a lot of good stuff on his site.

Lantyssa, that's close to how I've been running things. There's an over-arching story, but how they choose to interact with it is all up to them. The problems I was having initially (before I started handhold a bit stronger) is that they were just ignoring everything that was going on, in favor of wandering randomly to somewhere else then complaining about random encounters (since I had nothing planned in Town_X).

This is entirely dependent on your players. There's no gaming experience more miserable than a freestyle- DMed game with 5 players who want to be led.

Just because it's freestyle doesnt mean they cant be led.  All freestyle implies is that there's no pre-gen adventure to railroad them with.

I'm extremely skeptical that more than about 1% of GMs can 'freestyle' better than they can working off of prepared material.

This. I can't imagine trying to present an interesting, complex dungeon without at least sketching a map and prepping a few encounters, traps, secrets, etc.

I still think back fondly to that time where we sat around for like an hour trying to figure out the CLUES (they have to be CLUES to something COMPLEX) and proudft finally lost patience (as much as he loses it, anyway) and told us to maybe go murder the dudes we know about for further information. Like we ALWAYS DO, only for some reason THAT NIGHT and THAT NIGHT ONLY, we were sure there was a Mystery afoot.

As a player I'm going to do my DM the honor of trying to at least touch on the stuff he prepared.  If my character has a good reason to go in a completely different direction then I'll let the GM know, but I won't do it randomly out of respect for the work he puts into preparing the game for us.

That doesn't mean we'll make his life easy, because what we do enjoy, is tackling adventures in unconventional means.  The GM has it a little harder since he wants to keep things entertaining without outright killing us, but we all enjoy trying to outwit one another.  If we can beat an encounter in a way he didn't foresee, or he surprises us with a twist we didn't expect, then we all have a great time.

Working with your GM despite being on opposing sides of the plot is important to an enjoyable game.

Our DM said that, when pressed, he'll "freestyle" using the Bioware model. One introductory adventure with multiple hooks, three or four modules that can be done "in any order" (he has to fudge some of the levels and futz a bit with the plot to tie them all together" and then one or two "ending modules" that finish that arc.

Then again, he habitually uses the maps and detail from AD&D and 2.0 modules in 3.5, so he's kinda used to altering things on the fly and combining storylines. Gives us a bit more of a feel of choice.

So this coming Saturday is our first session in the new "world" our campaign group has popped into.  The entire campaign moves the group around via portals and sometimes, those portals move us to an entirely different world, which means the DM is going to change the ruleset on us.  We started out playing 3e and in the last session, found this red portal that the barbarian decided to run into without talking about it first (carrying my dead body, I might add) and so everyone else followed along.  This resulted in the two of us who'd recently died suddenly being alive again and now we're in a 4e world.

I'm actually kind of looking forward to seeing how this all plays out with the new rules and if the whining from a few of the other members doesn't die down, then a smaller party isn't a bad thing (we've got 10 PCs as it is).  DM has already said that there is at least one more world with a different ruleset to come and that we'll be moving from world to world throughout the campaign.  It's an interesting twist.

Finally got some of my friends to play again, with me Skyping in. We just genned characters last night, so hopefully this works out alright when we start in earnest next week. Hopefully my Invoker works out - I purposely tried to build a character that minimizes necessary movement and calculating of precise AE attacks or tracking summons. I thought some of that would be doubly difficult to handle over Skype.

Man, there aren't very many invoker powers left (and I suspect even fewer good ones) once you remove the AE and summons. Should be interesting!

I'm definitely curious how this goes.  It's one of the things that the google+ hangout seems to scream to take advantage of.   

*Precise* AE placement...I still took some AE stuff, though hopefully I can fudge the target squares and just declare which guys I want covered. I didn't take any persistent AE powers. We'll see how it works out.

Well, we have a cam pointed at the board, and luckily the mic is good enough for me to pick up everyone speaking at the table (set next to the DM). I'll keep ya'll informed.

So we got our first session in tonight. Was a bit slow, due in large-part to folks re-learning how to play 4e. Wish they had a better cam/mic, but I'll live.

There were some dull spots due to things getting bogged down a bit in a large fight...however, with my 24" widescreen, I can have Skype and Firefox running side-by-side, so I was able to play on f13 and facebook between my turns. Only minor difficulty involved in aiming my AE spells.

Hopefully it continues to work out alright. Using a ranged character and keeping movement to a minimum definitely helped.