Next Friday, Shadowrun-themed game on the Apocalypse world rules. Excited!
I don't exactly know a lot about Shadowrun's rules, only the setting, but the GM stated that it's got rules so complex we'd have more fun on the simpler AW ruleset.
An amusing snark. I kind of expect I'll be writing something similar once I get my hands on D&D 5e Starter Set. Though that's a bad attitude to start off with.
I don't have a copy of the full AW rules at hand, just the freebie character sheet bits handed over to us by our GM in advance. It, at very least, looks simpler.
@Magician I was under the impression DnD 5e was going to be lighter on the rules?
@kviiri I've mostly moved towards that end of the spectrum myself.
But there's a huge difference between simple rules and bland rules, which is what I fear D&D 5e has. Not long now, the starter set should be on sale on 3rd of July.
I know DnD 4e the best, and I was frankly surprised when I played it the first time. I expected the latest incarnation of the legendary RPG to be a bit more flexible for role-playing.
A friend in the party made the same mistake, although in a more serious way: he insisted that his character was a pacifist in a game very obviously geared towards combat. While playing a striker class, even! :P
@Magician which brings us to one of those bland rules: in DnD 4e, you can just declare that you want to deal non-lethal damage to a target, and suddenly your arrow headshot causes a knockout instead of a terminal "arrow in head" syndrome.
Yup. We're rotating masters, now it's my turn and I'm struggling to make combat interesting. :(
The magic item bit got me nodding. I hate having to hand out treasure all the time. I prefer having few, memorable items to everyone having a gazillion boring generic stuff.
@kviiri Magician's blog, and my talks with him in chat, really helped me both get the most out of 4e while I was playing it, and keep from carrying a lot of D&Disms into my other games as I moved away from D&D-like engines.
I still consider myself a recovering D&Der--maybe always will--but I'm getting better at recognising it in myself and my games.
I recently took an old D&D 3.5 campaign setting/plot and rebuilt it for Fate and then for Storium. Lots of eye-opening insights into how thoroughly the D&D mindset and mechanics had permeated my worldbuilding and plotting.
Reading Magician's blog--the bits about the monsters he created for his groups--really helped me get my head around the versatility and potential for making monsters, and the pitfalls of them.
Assisting... well, outside combat and skill challenges it serves the purpose of speeding up the process of getting to the next combat or skill challenge, which is where 4e shines.
Within combat, it works because it's sacrificing a move.
In skill challenges... Stalker0's version addresses that.
> One distinct problem with the core system is its very casual about aid another, and mathematically it CANNOT be. Aid Another is the single most powerful mechanic in the entire system, and by the rules there’s very little restriction on it. Mathematically that’s suicide, parties can go from 7% to 90% win rates in the core system depending on how the DM utilizes aid another.
I found that with a more coherent skill challenge system and a new way of looking at encounter design, 4e was a lot of fun. A very specific kind of fun, and it was a ton of work for me, but fun nonetheless.
I need to work on my encounter design and try to convince the guys to streamline the combat somewhat. We have a large party (up to eight player characters, typically six) so combat tends to get tedious.
I've had similar issues, and been experimenting. Here are some of my findings:
ALWAYS have strategies in mind. Your squad has two, maybe three pre-determined strategies and the ever-available "every man for himself" panicking. They engage with one strat, move to the other if the situation calls...
One thing is that I gave my players a lot of the bookkeeping normally reserved for the GM.
We had a little whiteboard that I propped up with a bookend. We wrote everyone's initiative on it in order, with their name, and any time anyone (PC or NPC) got a condition we wrote it next to his name.
I like the idea of making NPC's surrender, and I even did that once during the last session. The party accepted it but reacted a bit like "oh, so this is how he bypasses prolonged battles".
For example, a dragon with a breath attack that recharged when he used his close burst wing attack, and his breath attack would recharge his wing attack.
I'd always give monsters an MBA and an RBA with an interesting rider, and at least one other cool power, but never very many powers and never ones that would be hard to choose between.
@BESW Naturally. Also, it's already there for dragons
(Also has a shoddy explanation in-universe!)
In our next session I'm pitting the party against a custom-designed low-level blue dragon with an evil cleric NPC as a rider. Gonna be a cool boss battle, I hope.
I'd also use monsters whose powers synergised well. For example, a mind flayer who could use an opportunity attack to teleport adjacent to a creature that took psychic damage... and a kuo-toa priest with a "5 psychic damage to anyone who starts his turn within 5 squares of me" aura.
It's a tactical issue. I either keep the damage low so they can blow defensive powers to eliminate it, or I make "playing keep-away" part of the encounter.
...or I can use it to force them to pay attention to that guy.
Which is what happened with the mind flayer: you always started your turn with the mind flayer staring you in the face, until you killed the priest.
The mind flayer was an elite, and the priest was a standard, so the priest was easier to take down.
But until then, the mind flayer was a major presence on the battlefield even if he didn't do much because he's already used up his opportunity attack for your turn.
...which in turn actually made it easier to kill the mind flayer because he'd be standing right there in front of you to get hit.
Ugh, one of my first and worst experiences as a dabbling GM was a pack of gnolls as described in... Monster vault, iirc. They have a power where they, once reduced to zero hp, would regen to 5 hitpoints and have strong damage resistance until next turn. I did allude to that ability to my players on their nature roll, but they tried to take it down anyway. I felt bad for that...
And some parts could shunt debuffs onto other parts; the head could pass any debuff onto its body.
@kviiri That took some tweaking. I wound up with this: the body had little to do on its turn, and had a lot of hit points. Each of the other four parts had 1/2 its hit points.
Killing the body killed the dragon.
Each time you killed a different part, you passed 1/4 of that part's total health in damage to the body.
I'll probably stick with a more traditional dragon for my boss though, although I'll make sure it has good synergy with the priestess of Tiamat riding it.
I've been thinking of something along these lines: the dragon tries to maintain a healthy distance and uses hit-and-run -attacks while the priestess grants it attack buffs and summons something between the dragon and the players. If the players try to go for the priestess, the dragon attempts to carry her to a safer spot, making feint attacks against the cleric a good strategy.
I had a fight with a teleportation circle: if you stood inside it you could use a minor action to teleport your move speed. At first the kobolds used it to run out from cover, make ranged attacks, then return to cover.
At the end of the combat, the fighter used it as part of going all the way across the map to run down the final kobold: a priest who was trying to get to the boss to raise him to fight again.
@kviiri Hrmm. Okay, maybe something like: he can smack the ground so hard he raises a line of difficult terrain which lasts the whole fight. Recharge when bloodied.
Would that question be appropriate for the main site area? I have done some digging with no luck. It would be somewhat list like but there are also very few items that grant DR.
@kviiri not sharing XP is just a way to punish players who miss a session and it throws a wrench into everything. If someone is that problematic they should just be asked to leave the group, otherwise a missed session here or there is not terrible
If the party has plenty to do while the dragon is flying, or a way to reliably force it down--like certain kinds of swordmage--then it's fine.
If the party won't be able to do much against a flying dragon and the defender requires melee to be effective (like a fighter), then the dragon should probably be kept grounded.
Remember, the goal of 4e combat is to challenge the party to come up with interesting tactical choices, but the general assumption is that they should prevail unless they and the dice are particularly failtastic.
That means giving them the opportunities to use their powers, rather than stymying them by denying them that opportunity. (Though once in a while dropping them outside their comfort zone is fine.)
@BESW We have a leader (cleric), three strikers (ranger, monk and warlock, the latter being often absent), two defenders (fighter and warden) and two controllers (wizard and druid, the latter being often absent)
@kviiri oh ok then I see why. But I would consider discussing the matter with your main GM. Especially if you can tell him why giving them XP anyway is better (my favourite motivation is "it's not a job")
Okay, so here's an idea: the dragon flies above dealing small amounts of area damage and creating terrain obstacles, and the ranger and warlock and wizard can take pot-shots at him... but he can remove debuffs from the priestess if he's adjacent to her.
and D&D 4e has the character lever show up a lot in the math, so lagging behind pretty much equals being way less effective - unless you build for it (lazy warlord or shaman)
@Zachiel I've proposed it, citing its tenets such as "less bookkeeping". He declined, another party member supported him, basically saying "it's not so bad". I would love to have them change their minds, but I don't want to argue about it - I am already an annoying pedant anyway.
@Zachiel Aye, penalising XP for non-attendance doesn't make people more likely to show up regularly... it makes them more likely to drop out if they can't make every game.
I've corrected the GM on rules about once per session. Only in cases where he misremembers stuff in the book as opposed to actually GM mandating stuff.
One decision he made annoyed me very much; he said that equipment looted from the monsters should use the same attack bonus the monster had when using it. If an orc throws a hand axe with a +9 attack roll, the hand axe still has a +9 attack roll when used by players regardless of their attributes.
@kviiri basically 4e assumes the party is of the same level, all of the monster math is against a party of 5 at the same level and then tweaked for numbers
@JoshuaAslanSmith Yes, it's he who had experience playing DnD before our group was formed. He gets a bit annoyed when a newbie like myself corrects him.
They can drop loot of appreciable value, it's optional for the GM to allow it. The hand axes were allowed because the fighter and warden wanted a ranged option.
Not really that, either. The players asked him whether they could take the hand-axes, and he said "yes". That's ok.
Of course the DMG states that the GM can, at their discretion, allow the party to loot the mundane stuff off monsters. So he could've refused - but that would've made no sense either. If the players wanted something to throw and there's a dead monster with hand-axes nearby, why not let them have those? If you're upset that giving the players a little mundane loot breaks the balance, you can just subtract their nominal market value from the gold parcel.
The issue isn't looting a monster every now and then, it's treating the monster bonuses as a part of the item.
@kviiri The basic idea is to give the dragon a cool thing he can do, but it compromises him tactically.
So it's not a case of "The dragon did something stupid," which would make him less threatening. The "OMG he can snarf debuffs!" should keep the threat level high even as he places himself in a killing zone.
I find the tough bit is deciding when to spawn more minions to the battlefield; it can feel pointless to the players if their victories against the little buggers get nulled by them respawning, even if it makes sense (eg. the minions are detatching from a larger unit "beyond the battlefield")
(Like, "At the beginning of your turn make a basic attack against your nearest ally as a free action, and you cannot attack the caster of this spell.")
@kviiri Absolutely. I shied away from those almost entirely in favour of more creative and less frustrating custom powers.
I believe toward the end of my 4e campaign I adjusted dominate to be "You have an extra standard action at the start of your turn which is controlled by the originator of this debuff; only at-will powers can be used for this action."
Like "grant 5 temp hp to an ally within 5 squares" (drag minions away from their friends to kill them); "the minion's square becomes difficult terrain until the end of the encounter;" and so forth.
I was especially fond of "Stepstool: While this minion is prone but living, allies can enter its square. They have a +2 bonus to ranged attacks while in this square."
I once had a fight with a boss that spawned minions for two rounds, then consumed them all on the third round to deal an attack which scaled based on the number of minions he absorbed.
(The monk loved that fight.)
I also once had an adventure where the minion spirits defeated in one combat adhered to the PC who killed them (I had the players keep the minis of minions they killed) and could be "spent" to good effect in later fights in that dungeon.
You get the idea; offer interesting choices and create opportunities for players to be awesome by using their characters' signature moves.
4e is about creating setpieces for the PCs to be awesome in.
Any opinions / pointers on having double-bladed item effects in DnD 4e? Weapons, amulets etc with strong powers but also some factor that harms the wielder while using them.
I feel a constant gameplay penalty would be too much of a pain, but maybe something that includes roleplaying ("this amulet is blessed by Tiamat, and makes you greedy.") or involves penalty only on activation (spend surge/hp to debuff enemies) would possibly work better.
I'm not exactly averse to creating my own items :)
Basically, my party is going to fight a priestess of Tiamat and her companion dragon. I think it'd be fitting for the priestess to have a piece or two of powerful items with Tiamat's blessing, but as Tiamat isn't exactly a friendly god I want there to be some flavor in the items' reminding the players of their evil origin.
Btw, I specifically chose Tiamat as my villain character's god because I find her to be the most interesting evil god. The rest are too obviously evil and wicked. Tiamat leaves more room for the "affable evil" character.
You know, an evil character who is friendly, polite, charming on occasion. Doesn't necessarily go out of their way to do evil stuff. Still clearly evil, but with a human touch!
Would you read the following as meaning I need to aquire passports from when I was 7 years old? The U.S. citizen parent(s) must present his/her current and expired U.S. passports and a photocopy of each photo- page.
Or is my D&D rules lawyering just getting in my way?
@kviiri Avoid alignment as much as possible in 4e, mechanically it only resticts which gods you can follow as a divine character and certain class features for the black guard, thats it.
PWK is exactly what it looks like, no save, you're dead (provided you have <100 hp)...will be interesting to see how that stacks up with other L9 spells
(does a L20 fighter have a power/ability that will do 100 damage?)
