Lord Palingtonhe.him.hisHistory-loving pal!Registered Userregular
If you have a D&D Insider account, they have tons of 4e adventures for all kinds of levels, and even a few adventure paths (taking a party from heroic to paragon or so, I think). Just look in the dungeon magazine archive. I've got a ton downloaded for my group (when we get back from Gamma World, anyway).
I'll take a look at that. One of our guys got an account so we can play with the character builder. Is that the same access? (sorry at work, have to wait until I get home to check)
Lord Palingtonhe.him.hisHistory-loving pal!Registered Userregular
That's the same access, yes. Once you're on the Dungeon Magazine Insider webpage, there should be a section in the upper right called "Magazine Links," the one you're after is "Dungeon Article Archive."
If you organize the list by "Category," it'll have all the adventure paths (multiple, linked adventures) at the top, then right after that the single adventures. Unfortunately, they don't have them listed by level until you click on them, but give them a look. Once you're in range of levels 6-8, I would definitely recommend the Lord of the White Plains. It's a pretty well-written adventure about a plague of the undead, and some of the better skill challenges I've seen in official sources.
Lord Palingtonhe.him.hisHistory-loving pal!Registered Userregular
Awesome, glad to be of help.
If you're looking for a less linear path but still have it be persistent, check out the Chaos Scar adventures. There's no particular order, but they're all in the same geographic area.
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TiamatZGhost punsThe Banette of my existenceRegistered Userregular
I posted this in the General Roleplaying thread, but decided to add it here as well. Skott Kurtz and the PA crew are doing character creation for DnD Next in preparation for this year's PAX.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I posted this in the General Roleplaying thread, but decided to add it here as well. Skott Kurtz and the PA crew are doing character creation for DnD Next in preparation for this year's PAX.
Gabe probably asked on of the most direct and relevant questions of dndnext more or less with "Why should I buy this". I am going to be interested in Mearls response, because thus far I cant think of one beyond "it's the new edition of dnd!".
I listened to the new podcast last night. Gabe took Mearls to task with some really difficult questions. Mearls mostly didn't have any answers for those questions and Gabe wasn't having any of it. He just could not make the case on why you should buy it. Mearls yammered on and on about DM empowerment and Gabe continued to counter with "I can already do that" or "I already have those tools". At one point Mearls admitted that if you don't like this Next then you should stick to 4e, which is just awful since the point of these podcasts is to sell product after all.
Tycho did a better job of defending D&DNext than Mearls did. At some points he was forced to put words in Mearls mouth. For example, when Tycho said Next was balanced by adventure rather than by encounter (which, if you read and played any of the playtest material, is straightup goosery). Anything that seemed to pique Gabe's interest about Next came from Tycho rather than Mearls.
Scott seemed rather enamored with the "old school" feel of Next, so he was experiencing nostalgia high. Outside of that didn't really have anything to say for most of the podcast.
I like how the podcast was supposed to be about converting their 4e characters to Next, but the closest they got to doing any work on the characters was Mearls saying that he only had guides on characters up to fifth level.
Yeah, it was nice to hear someone actually present some of the problems I've had with Next directly to Mearls.
It was less nice to hear that his response was mostly to stutter and backpedal.
The bit where they discuss goblins at the cave entrance was telling. Mearls says Next lets you do easy throwaway fights, Mike responds that you do that in 4e with some minions, and then Mearls stutters some stuff about how the 4e party hasn't been impacted, but in the Next party, the fighter took some damage so he's down hit points for the next fight.
But...in 4e, that also happens, it just means that the fighter is missing a surge - the primary pacing resource for a party. And the fact that the party's actual combat effectiveness hasn't changed in 4e is literally a defining design choice of the system, one which they were only a few years ago selling as something that let you challenge the party more effectively because you always knew their capabilities. They used to specifically point out that it was shitty for the party to go into a fight low on hp because when you designed the encounter you had no way to know whether they'd be at full or half or almost dead, and therefore no way to balance the encounter effectively.
I'm a little disappointed that Jerry reigned in the conversation before Mike got to point this out, but I suppose someone in the room had to be promoting a product.
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
So now I have no reason to give a flying damn about Next any more. If your primary design guy/lead speaker-to-nerds can't figure out this shit, your product is a lemon.
Mike mentioned not being able to challenge his characters once they got to about 20th level... does anyone know how much he tried the MM3 monsters and conversion rules?
Mike mentioned not being able to challenge his characters once they got to about 20th level... does anyone know how much he tried the MM3 monsters and conversion rules?
Not sure, but he mentions that his playgroup is a bunch of competitive Magic players, and that they went to the extent of synergizing not just their own characters but deliberately choosing cross-character party synergies to build a single five-headed killing machine.
Speaking as an optimizy card player myself, and having seen the stuff you can get up to if you're willing to optimize that much, there's not much printed material that can challenge a party willing to do that. You basically have to write your own monsters who can synergize with each other as well as the party can.
That's how you get Radiant Mafia parties and other such god-killing silliness.
Edit: But it should be noted that this is kind of an edge case. MM3 math is plenty for most parties, even ones with well-optimized characters. To be able to trivialize those monsters requires the cooperation and optimization of an entire group, and if that's the group you're playing with, you're probably roughly as good at it as they are and should be able to keep up pretty well once you get the system figured out.
I've seen incredible synergy from players who know how to make good characters but didn't coordinate on making their characters other than "what role should I fill", to the point that they could do DC +8 encounters without too much trouble, so I can only imagine what a completely synergistic team could accomplish.
God I found that podcast hilarious. I absolutely loved it. The inability to get any sort of hype going out of the gate is a huge problem, I'm kind of surprised that WotC marketing is plowing ahead with the series. Maybe everyone grits their teeth and gets through the two hours without walking out, so, success?
As for Jerry and Scott's take on it, they didn't exactly sound super-enthused either. Scott's "it's very...... old-school" was the response to "did you like it?" and then he somewhat defeatedly describes what happened. And then there's Jerry's explaining the awesomeness of healing strike and surges, concluding with "the old great version, that you're about to fuck up", which isn't exactly a defending Mike Mearls' seat either.
If your primary design guy/lead speaker-to-nerds can't figure out this shit, your product is a lemon.
Sometimes I think that the biggest failing of how 5e has been handled so far is that it's catering entirely to a) the grognards (but we'll not get into that) and b) the vocal set of people who own 20-some tabletop games (I'm one of them, don't get me wrong) and may be excited for all the silliness about super modularity and infinite options and so on. When you drink your own kool-aid that much, you get exchanges like the podcast where what you're delivering makes no sense to the actual customers --- in this case, yes, huge nerds, but ones whose primary concern about the game (or maybe even tabletop in general) is "I don't care why there's a new edition, why are you changing the good thing we had?". I think if Mearls were talking to a bunch of tabletop bloggaires they'd eat all that generic "the game is perfect because it does whatever you want" shit up.
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"Themes are called backgrounds and backgrounds are called specialties. They do pretty much the same thing, but we've decided to call them...something different."
They start talking about skills, and Mearls is like 'well, we have a commerce skill. and...' followed by several minutes of him pulling up docs trying to look up what skills 5e has before he gives up and just has Jerry read off the skills that his 4e character has, more or less going 'yeah, those. you have those.' and there's another exchange along the lines of 'yeah, we have diplomacy and bluff. we might, like...change the name, though. you know.'
It really seems like they should have more than word docs and sticky notes before they start trying to do promotional material. Like, if your plan for your promo is to do a character conversion of 10th-level characters...maybe wait to do that until you have 10th-level abilities to give them? There's a ton of 'well, we've only got, like...ten spells designed right now. but there'll be more later!" and "Well, your specialty would probably be 'leader'. we haven't actually designed that one yet, but it'll probably do some warlord stuff. Cool warlord stuff."
Also at one point Mike completely interrupts Mearls' explanation of something in order to announce that he has gotten bored and sketched a design for an evil acid whale, which seems to (understandably) cause Mearls to short-circuit in confusion.
It IS neat that they seem to be expanding the influence of themes, though. It sounds like one's theme (specialty? background? mechanical twirly bit.) will be almost as defining of one's character as the class, which is interesting. I would have liked to have seen that growth in the game I will actually be playing.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Mike mentioned not being able to challenge his characters once they got to about 20th level... does anyone know how much he tried the MM3 monsters and conversion rules?
Yeah I think he gave in the towel before MM3, but even so even if he didn't want to use certain monsters like demons you are just stuffed for choices. This boils down to the fact wizards never explained how to design epic tier adventures, they never published significant epic tier content, they ceased supporting epic tier with varied and interesting monsters. The list goes on, but the point is that there is a lot of shit that is just useless at epic tier from previous books without work to convert them and it goes beyond maths. Consider the powers, abilities and concepts in MM3 monster design is well above that of previous creatures. This is what makes them genuinely competitive and it's not a simple matter of increasing damage: MM3 changed the entire meta game.
In any event, Mike is just pretty much giving Mearls the what for when it comes to dndnext. As others have said, if Mearls can't sell it to these guys who can they sell it to? I like to think the answer is obvious there.
I'm kind of amazed that they're going to use something in alpha/beta as the high profile event at PAX. Whenever the podcast was recorded, it was littered with TODOs by the sound of it, so I don't know what they're going to run at PAX but it sounds like it's going to be rough.
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I listened to the podcasts and it and they didn't sound all bad, though I haven't play tested it yet so I don't know.
I'm trying to to be jaded about the next version, but I will say that so far it doesn't really sound like a fit for my group. My players love to fight more than anything, they play it more as a tactical game than a role playing game. I'm trying to push them to role play more, but I'm not going to force it on them if they really don't want to.
If you want to emphasize more roleplaying, I would suggest borrowing elements from something else. As an example I've been putzing around with overlaying some of the story game elements from 13th Age on top of 4e. My D&D groups don't tend to roleplay much either, and we're all fine with it, but the 13th Age elements are an intriguing hook into that space without being too much like bad embarrassing improv.
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Hey guys, I'm jumping into Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in awhile and wanted to use a character creator alongside the PHB (not something that replaces it, but keeps track of the choices and the calculations). Is tinwatchman.com/chargen/index.php a good choice? It seems to offer the very basics, literally just taking whatever choices you give it and then spewing out the stats. The one problem I found is that the show calculations menu at the end didn't account for an extra bonus point to attack on a Fighter. It counted properly, but didn't mention it (3+2=6) so I had hunt down that extra point to ensure it was right.
Any other opinions on this tool? It seems to make less mistake than I do
Can I get some clarification on the Paladin's divine challenge? If I have a current target marked at the beginning of my turn and attack them I can then use my divine challenge on a different enemy 5 squares away from me. My question is, does that newly marked enemy stay marked for the round? The power says I need to engage the target but does the inital mark count as engaging them and the mark fades if I don't move adjecent or attack them on my next turn.
During a game, I had a target marked, I hit him with Holy Strike for the bonus damage, then I minored Divine Challenged a guy 5 squares away and ended my turn. The DM then started the enemies turn and said that my marks falls of because I didn't engage. I didn't argue and we played it out but I was still wondering because I'd like to know if I can do it in the furture. (we're all kinds of new still to certain rules and how things work)
ok, so my 4th ed. party has gone through some pruning in the last few weeks. we started with:
a half-orc monk
an eladrin warlord (me)
an eladrin wizard
a teifling ardent
a minotaur warden
an elf ranger
the ranger dropped out almost immediately, which has put a lot of pressure on the monk to be worth 2 strikers, but myself and the ardent have tried to build towards making him better (for example, i retrained to take commander's strike, and just picked up knight's move).
now, the warden has dropped out too. we're sitting with 2 leaders, a striker, a controller and no defender. any suggestions for how we could pick up the slack of not having a defender?
It's hard. Of all the roles in 4e Leader and Defender are probably the most vital. If one of the leaders doesn't fancy re-rolling a Defender the DM may just have to fiddle the encounters a little. As things stand, 2 leaders should allow you to mass heal through the extra damage you take, but fights are going to be long drawn out affairs.
my original thinking was to have both leaders pick up a defender multi-class, but the fact that they're once per encounter doesnt fill me with confidence. also, thinking about it, the monk has way more AC (and health IIRC) then either of the leaders.. might be smarter to have him take a dip into the defender pool and then just have both leaders always healing him...
i did talk to our DM about it, and he confessed that he's not quite at the level of being able to customize encounters for our classes yet - he's pretty new to DMing and 4e, and p&p games in general. any advice for customizing encounters that i could send his way?
I don't know what level you guys are, but the really most important aspect of the Defender is a punishable marking ability. If your group doesn't care about being balanced or anything, find the player willing to be the "tank" and give him an enforceable mark ability. Maybe offer him an additional (slight) defensive bonus, and have it all cost him a feat or two. It won't be "balanced" but it should get the job done.
Aside from that, the PHB1 Warpriest Paragon Path grants an effective marking ability at level 16. I took that with my melee Cleric from a few years ago to make him a decent offtank. That might have gotten nerfed though? If it was, just say screw the errata and keep it as it reads in the book and it should be okay.
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
Well the thing that Defenders are supposed to do is pin down individual monsters and punish them for running around so much and/or wanting to hit the wizard, so another thing that could be done is to include more hindering, blocking and damaging terrain, and encourage players to use the environment like it was a defender. Monks, with all their nifty movement riders, can be particularly good at this for example.
Similarly you can have them find 'sticky' consumables like pints of oil, kobold gluepots, pinning arrows etc. which can have similar off-defender effects. Or even combine the two by letting them chuck oil all over the place then set it on fire.
It may be necessary to allow some leeway with the action economy here though; allowing someone to hip-barge a monster they're standing next to (bull rush at -1 with no movement before) as a move action and such.
my original thinking was to have both leaders pick up a defender multi-class, but the fact that they're once per encounter doesnt fill me with confidence. also, thinking about it, the monk has way more AC (and health IIRC) then either of the leaders.. might be smarter to have him take a dip into the defender pool and then just have both leaders always healing him...
i did talk to our DM about it, and he confessed that he's not quite at the level of being able to customize encounters for our classes yet - he's pretty new to DMing and 4e, and p&p games in general. any advice for customizing encounters that i could send his way?
Assuming nobody wants to reroll, the solution you are searching for is in the DMG2.
Have the DM roll up a defender companion character, have the player who is most comfortable with combat pilot it during fights, and have the DM adjust encounter difficulty appropriately.
Companion characters are basically Lite PCs. They get a couple encounter powers but no dailies, they're designed to be simple and easy to pilot, and they're also designed for exactly this - filling holes in party composition so that people can play what they want. DM gets an NPC that he can run out-of-combat to help move things along, and the party gets a no-frills basic defender to keep its shit from falling apart. win/win.
Make sure the DM is aware that he is supposed to treat a party with a companion character as having +1 players when designing encounters, otherwise you will likely find some of the combats to be too easy.
Honestly, if you are still near the beginning of the campaign, asking one of your leaders to roll up a defender might be your best bet.
Otherwise, ask your gm to go easy on the solos, or throw a bunch of baddies with personal grudges against the warlord at you.
And if your player is really attached to the character then I'd suggest just doing a reskin where you only change the mechanics and none of the fluff surrounding the character changing from warlord to fighter for example isn't really a huge leap in terms of story.
Also let me outline the combat scenario I have in mind for my next game.
The players have just narrowly managed to defeat a young white dragon (one player dead, two unconscious!) and now they meet Dirina Mornbrow outside of the Manor where the battle took place. In my version of the Nentire Vale she is actually a priestess of Torog who rejuvinates herself by torturing others. So I'm thinking everyone hops on the coach Dirina reveals herself as THE IRONMAIDEN and a high speed coach chase ensues where the heroes have to keep their companions from bleeding out while fighting off dirina and a coach full of mooks. Then a round or so in a human shaped shadow flickers over the battle field and the peryton that has been stalking the party from a distance swoops in and tears the heart out of some poor follower of Torog. The battle heats up even more. THEN in say the third or fourth round the rage drake baby that the half orc monk has been carrying around in egg form in his backpack hatches and attacks, it can only be calmed by its "mummy" Paul the perverted half orc monk.
I'll let you guys know when I've actually ironed out the technicalities of the encounter but that's the idea at the moment...
ok, so my 4th ed. party has gone through some pruning in the last few weeks. we started with:
a half-orc monk
an eladrin warlord (me)
an eladrin wizard
a teifling ardent
a minotaur warden
an elf ranger
the ranger dropped out almost immediately, which has put a lot of pressure on the monk to be worth 2 strikers, but myself and the ardent have tried to build towards making him better (for example, i retrained to take commander's strike, and just picked up knight's move).
now, the warden has dropped out too. we're sitting with 2 leaders, a striker, a controller and no defender. any suggestions for how we could pick up the slack of not having a defender?
Leaders: don't bother with attack-granting powers unless the Monk's basic attack is good. It probably isn't. Instead, go for healing, saving throws, damage, and everything else Leaders are supposed to do. Get up in front alongside the monk; you're melee classes and the warlord should have a decent melee basic, if not the tricks a defender gets to back up its OAs.
Monk: Hit like trucks. Keep doing your job, I guess. Keep your defenses up.
Wizard: Keep enemies from ganging up on your meatshields and have tricks to get yourself out of trouble. Wizards have a ton of 'em.
Everyone: Keep your defenses up, invest in your own survivability. There's no-one to protect you besides each other, and none of you are particularly good at it for more than maybe a turn at a time.
DM: Encounters with one or two enemies that do a ton of damage should be saved for special occasions. The party doesn't have a defender to occupy those guys. Skirmishers also, maybe? No defender to hold them in place; use knowing PCs options are limited in dealing with these.
None of the roles are THAT important, I think. I'd at least give going defenderless a go before making someone reroll.
Also let me outline the combat scenario I have in mind for my next game.
The players have just narrowly managed to defeat a young white dragon (one player dead, two unconscious!) and now they meet Dirina Mornbrow outside of the Manor where the battle took place. In my version of the Nentire Vale she is actually a priestess of Torog who rejuvinates herself by torturing others. So I'm thinking everyone hops on the coach Dirina reveals herself as THE IRONMAIDEN and a high speed coach chase ensues where the heroes have to keep their companions from bleeding out while fighting off dirina and a coach full of mooks. Then a round or so in a human shaped shadow flickers over the battle field and the peryton that has been stalking the party from a distance swoops in and tears the heart out of some poor follower of Torog. The battle heats up even more. THEN in say the third or fourth round the rage drake baby that the half orc monk has been carrying around in egg form in his backpack hatches and attacks, it can only be calmed by its "mummy" Paul the perverted half orc monk.
I'll let you guys know when I've actually ironed out the technicalities of the encounter but that's the idea at the moment...
That sounds like a really entertaining setpiece encounter. I kind of envy your players.
I was looking for gabe's collected D&D posts as well as his adventure Dusk. It looks like the original link is dead now but I found it via the wayback machine. Thought I'd link to it here to save anyone else trying the same thing some trouble
So last night my wife was going to head out to her Saturday game where they were playing a level 10 adventure (I don't know the name) and asked me to make her a character. I think I've made more for her recently than me, but I find it fun, being given a theme. Like my previous, pyromaniac wizard. This time her criteria were "One of the other guys is playing a warlord so he said a decent basic attack would be good, and cold damage would be useful."
So I made her a Cha/Str Dragonborn Sorceror. (BTW, why aren't Dragonborn a suggested class for sorcerors?)
I think it's some of my best work. I especially liked the way the first 4 feats interacted, to boost not only her Dragonbreath attack and damage by a significant amount, but essentially gave an expertise feat and let it recharge when she takes cold damage, which turned out to be crucial in that fight. She used it three times.
I decided to tag along cause I had nothing to do that night, hadn't been in a while, and I wanted to see how the sorc played. I borrowed a knight off one of the guys so he could play his rogue (who died spectacularly). Our party was kind of both awesome and terrible for the fight. The enemies were all swarm types, but the room layout and our battle order made it kind of hard for our casters to get much done for the first part of the fight. Me, the warlord, and the rogue weren't doing too much damage, but the guy had made the knight with the Enter the Crucible power, so at one point in I used Come and Get It to pull all the enemies to me, popped the daily and gained 10 resist all till the end of the fight. Which was smarter than I'd realized, because the boss was a solo controller and the vast majority of the damage in the fight was 10 ongoing ticks, or 8/10 ticks from starting your turn next to the enemy. After that point I took about twice as much damage from team blasts (including one crit) than from the enemies.
It was kind of funny how they suggested she should have cold damage, because we had another cold dragonborn, a witch with a cold burst at-will, and the warlord with a cold blast weapon power, and I think they were all just thinking we had a fun theme group, with maybe stacking vulnerability and conditions or something. When they found out her breath recharged their eyes lit up.
Speaking of which, it said it recharges when takes damage of that type. If she has resist cold 5 does she have to take enough to actually lose HP or would something she could entirely soak also count. Or would that be up to DM fiat?
He might not appreciate her standing next to her stalagmites and soaking 5 damage ticks to charge her breath every turn.
Oh yeah. Those couple feats were so texty I'd forgotten by the time I printed out the sheet. And the feat descriptions on the sheet are very terse. So much so that sometimes they are entirely unhelpful.
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If you organize the list by "Category," it'll have all the adventure paths (multiple, linked adventures) at the top, then right after that the single adventures. Unfortunately, they don't have them listed by level until you click on them, but give them a look. Once you're in range of levels 6-8, I would definitely recommend the Lord of the White Plains. It's a pretty well-written adventure about a plague of the undead, and some of the better skill challenges I've seen in official sources.
3DS FC: 5086-1134-6451
Shiny Code: 3837
3DS FC: 5086-1134-6451
Shiny Code: 3837
If you're looking for a less linear path but still have it be persistent, check out the Chaos Scar adventures. There's no particular order, but they're all in the same geographic area.
Tycho did a better job of defending D&DNext than Mearls did. At some points he was forced to put words in Mearls mouth. For example, when Tycho said Next was balanced by adventure rather than by encounter (which, if you read and played any of the playtest material, is straightup goosery). Anything that seemed to pique Gabe's interest about Next came from Tycho rather than Mearls.
Scott seemed rather enamored with the "old school" feel of Next, so he was experiencing nostalgia high. Outside of that didn't really have anything to say for most of the podcast.
It was less nice to hear that his response was mostly to stutter and backpedal.
The bit where they discuss goblins at the cave entrance was telling. Mearls says Next lets you do easy throwaway fights, Mike responds that you do that in 4e with some minions, and then Mearls stutters some stuff about how the 4e party hasn't been impacted, but in the Next party, the fighter took some damage so he's down hit points for the next fight.
But...in 4e, that also happens, it just means that the fighter is missing a surge - the primary pacing resource for a party. And the fact that the party's actual combat effectiveness hasn't changed in 4e is literally a defining design choice of the system, one which they were only a few years ago selling as something that let you challenge the party more effectively because you always knew their capabilities. They used to specifically point out that it was shitty for the party to go into a fight low on hp because when you designed the encounter you had no way to know whether they'd be at full or half or almost dead, and therefore no way to balance the encounter effectively.
I'm a little disappointed that Jerry reigned in the conversation before Mike got to point this out, but I suppose someone in the room had to be promoting a product.
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Not sure, but he mentions that his playgroup is a bunch of competitive Magic players, and that they went to the extent of synergizing not just their own characters but deliberately choosing cross-character party synergies to build a single five-headed killing machine.
Speaking as an optimizy card player myself, and having seen the stuff you can get up to if you're willing to optimize that much, there's not much printed material that can challenge a party willing to do that. You basically have to write your own monsters who can synergize with each other as well as the party can.
That's how you get Radiant Mafia parties and other such god-killing silliness.
Edit: But it should be noted that this is kind of an edge case. MM3 math is plenty for most parties, even ones with well-optimized characters. To be able to trivialize those monsters requires the cooperation and optimization of an entire group, and if that's the group you're playing with, you're probably roughly as good at it as they are and should be able to keep up pretty well once you get the system figured out.
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As for Jerry and Scott's take on it, they didn't exactly sound super-enthused either. Scott's "it's very...... old-school" was the response to "did you like it?" and then he somewhat defeatedly describes what happened. And then there's Jerry's explaining the awesomeness of healing strike and surges, concluding with "the old great version, that you're about to fuck up", which isn't exactly a defending Mike Mearls' seat either.
Sometimes I think that the biggest failing of how 5e has been handled so far is that it's catering entirely to a) the grognards (but we'll not get into that) and b) the vocal set of people who own 20-some tabletop games (I'm one of them, don't get me wrong) and may be excited for all the silliness about super modularity and infinite options and so on. When you drink your own kool-aid that much, you get exchanges like the podcast where what you're delivering makes no sense to the actual customers --- in this case, yes, huge nerds, but ones whose primary concern about the game (or maybe even tabletop in general) is "I don't care why there's a new edition, why are you changing the good thing we had?". I think if Mearls were talking to a bunch of tabletop bloggaires they'd eat all that generic "the game is perfect because it does whatever you want" shit up.
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"Themes are called backgrounds and backgrounds are called specialties. They do pretty much the same thing, but we've decided to call them...something different."
They start talking about skills, and Mearls is like 'well, we have a commerce skill. and...' followed by several minutes of him pulling up docs trying to look up what skills 5e has before he gives up and just has Jerry read off the skills that his 4e character has, more or less going 'yeah, those. you have those.' and there's another exchange along the lines of 'yeah, we have diplomacy and bluff. we might, like...change the name, though. you know.'
It really seems like they should have more than word docs and sticky notes before they start trying to do promotional material. Like, if your plan for your promo is to do a character conversion of 10th-level characters...maybe wait to do that until you have 10th-level abilities to give them? There's a ton of 'well, we've only got, like...ten spells designed right now. but there'll be more later!" and "Well, your specialty would probably be 'leader'. we haven't actually designed that one yet, but it'll probably do some warlord stuff. Cool warlord stuff."
Also at one point Mike completely interrupts Mearls' explanation of something in order to announce that he has gotten bored and sketched a design for an evil acid whale, which seems to (understandably) cause Mearls to short-circuit in confusion.
It IS neat that they seem to be expanding the influence of themes, though. It sounds like one's theme (specialty? background? mechanical twirly bit.) will be almost as defining of one's character as the class, which is interesting. I would have liked to have seen that growth in the game I will actually be playing.
Yeah I think he gave in the towel before MM3, but even so even if he didn't want to use certain monsters like demons you are just stuffed for choices. This boils down to the fact wizards never explained how to design epic tier adventures, they never published significant epic tier content, they ceased supporting epic tier with varied and interesting monsters. The list goes on, but the point is that there is a lot of shit that is just useless at epic tier from previous books without work to convert them and it goes beyond maths. Consider the powers, abilities and concepts in MM3 monster design is well above that of previous creatures. This is what makes them genuinely competitive and it's not a simple matter of increasing damage: MM3 changed the entire meta game.
In any event, Mike is just pretty much giving Mearls the what for when it comes to dndnext. As others have said, if Mearls can't sell it to these guys who can they sell it to? I like to think the answer is obvious there.
Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e
Occasional words about games: my site
I'm trying to to be jaded about the next version, but I will say that so far it doesn't really sound like a fit for my group. My players love to fight more than anything, they play it more as a tactical game than a role playing game. I'm trying to push them to role play more, but I'm not going to force it on them if they really don't want to.
Tabletop:13th Age (mm-mmm), D&D 4e
Occasional words about games: my site
Any other opinions on this tool? It seems to make less mistake than I do
PSN: ShinyRedKnight Xbox Live: ShinyRedKnight
During a game, I had a target marked, I hit him with Holy Strike for the bonus damage, then I minored Divine Challenged a guy 5 squares away and ended my turn. The DM then started the enemies turn and said that my marks falls of because I didn't engage. I didn't argue and we played it out but I was still wondering because I'd like to know if I can do it in the furture. (we're all kinds of new still to certain rules and how things work)
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a half-orc monk
an eladrin warlord (me)
an eladrin wizard
a teifling ardent
a minotaur warden
an elf ranger
the ranger dropped out almost immediately, which has put a lot of pressure on the monk to be worth 2 strikers, but myself and the ardent have tried to build towards making him better (for example, i retrained to take commander's strike, and just picked up knight's move).
now, the warden has dropped out too. we're sitting with 2 leaders, a striker, a controller and no defender. any suggestions for how we could pick up the slack of not having a defender?
i did talk to our DM about it, and he confessed that he's not quite at the level of being able to customize encounters for our classes yet - he's pretty new to DMing and 4e, and p&p games in general. any advice for customizing encounters that i could send his way?
Aside from that, the PHB1 Warpriest Paragon Path grants an effective marking ability at level 16. I took that with my melee Cleric from a few years ago to make him a decent offtank. That might have gotten nerfed though? If it was, just say screw the errata and keep it as it reads in the book and it should be okay.
Similarly you can have them find 'sticky' consumables like pints of oil, kobold gluepots, pinning arrows etc. which can have similar off-defender effects. Or even combine the two by letting them chuck oil all over the place then set it on fire.
It may be necessary to allow some leeway with the action economy here though; allowing someone to hip-barge a monster they're standing next to (bull rush at -1 with no movement before) as a move action and such.
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Otherwise, ask your gm to go easy on the solos, or throw a bunch of baddies with personal grudges against the warlord at you.
Assuming nobody wants to reroll, the solution you are searching for is in the DMG2.
Have the DM roll up a defender companion character, have the player who is most comfortable with combat pilot it during fights, and have the DM adjust encounter difficulty appropriately.
Companion characters are basically Lite PCs. They get a couple encounter powers but no dailies, they're designed to be simple and easy to pilot, and they're also designed for exactly this - filling holes in party composition so that people can play what they want. DM gets an NPC that he can run out-of-combat to help move things along, and the party gets a no-frills basic defender to keep its shit from falling apart. win/win.
Make sure the DM is aware that he is supposed to treat a party with a companion character as having +1 players when designing encounters, otherwise you will likely find some of the combats to be too easy.
And if your player is really attached to the character then I'd suggest just doing a reskin where you only change the mechanics and none of the fluff surrounding the character changing from warlord to fighter for example isn't really a huge leap in terms of story.
Also let me outline the combat scenario I have in mind for my next game.
The players have just narrowly managed to defeat a young white dragon (one player dead, two unconscious!) and now they meet Dirina Mornbrow outside of the Manor where the battle took place. In my version of the Nentire Vale she is actually a priestess of Torog who rejuvinates herself by torturing others. So I'm thinking everyone hops on the coach Dirina reveals herself as THE IRONMAIDEN and a high speed coach chase ensues where the heroes have to keep their companions from bleeding out while fighting off dirina and a coach full of mooks. Then a round or so in a human shaped shadow flickers over the battle field and the peryton that has been stalking the party from a distance swoops in and tears the heart out of some poor follower of Torog. The battle heats up even more. THEN in say the third or fourth round the rage drake baby that the half orc monk has been carrying around in egg form in his backpack hatches and attacks, it can only be calmed by its "mummy" Paul the perverted half orc monk.
I'll let you guys know when I've actually ironed out the technicalities of the encounter but that's the idea at the moment...
Leaders: don't bother with attack-granting powers unless the Monk's basic attack is good. It probably isn't. Instead, go for healing, saving throws, damage, and everything else Leaders are supposed to do. Get up in front alongside the monk; you're melee classes and the warlord should have a decent melee basic, if not the tricks a defender gets to back up its OAs.
Monk: Hit like trucks. Keep doing your job, I guess. Keep your defenses up.
Wizard: Keep enemies from ganging up on your meatshields and have tricks to get yourself out of trouble. Wizards have a ton of 'em.
Everyone: Keep your defenses up, invest in your own survivability. There's no-one to protect you besides each other, and none of you are particularly good at it for more than maybe a turn at a time.
DM: Encounters with one or two enemies that do a ton of damage should be saved for special occasions. The party doesn't have a defender to occupy those guys. Skirmishers also, maybe? No defender to hold them in place; use knowing PCs options are limited in dealing with these.
None of the roles are THAT important, I think. I'd at least give going defenderless a go before making someone reroll.
That sounds like a really entertaining setpiece encounter. I kind of envy your players.
http://web.archive.org/web/20101204172552/http://www.penny-arcade.com/gabednd/
So I made her a Cha/Str Dragonborn Sorceror. (BTW, why aren't Dragonborn a suggested class for sorcerors?)
I decided to tag along cause I had nothing to do that night, hadn't been in a while, and I wanted to see how the sorc played. I borrowed a knight off one of the guys so he could play his rogue (who died spectacularly). Our party was kind of both awesome and terrible for the fight. The enemies were all swarm types, but the room layout and our battle order made it kind of hard for our casters to get much done for the first part of the fight. Me, the warlord, and the rogue weren't doing too much damage, but the guy had made the knight with the Enter the Crucible power, so at one point in I used Come and Get It to pull all the enemies to me, popped the daily and gained 10 resist all till the end of the fight. Which was smarter than I'd realized, because the boss was a solo controller and the vast majority of the damage in the fight was 10 ongoing ticks, or 8/10 ticks from starting your turn next to the enemy. After that point I took about twice as much damage from team blasts (including one crit) than from the enemies.
It was kind of funny how they suggested she should have cold damage, because we had another cold dragonborn, a witch with a cold burst at-will, and the warlord with a cold blast weapon power, and I think they were all just thinking we had a fun theme group, with maybe stacking vulnerability and conditions or something. When they found out her breath recharged their eyes lit up.
Speaking of which, it said it recharges when takes damage of that type. If she has resist cold 5 does she have to take enough to actually lose HP or would something she could entirely soak also count. Or would that be up to DM fiat?
He might not appreciate her standing next to her stalagmites and soaking 5 damage ticks to charge her breath every turn.
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