[DnD 4E Discussion] Psion is out and it is awesome, and I normally hate psionics.

OptimusZed

Infidel wrote: »

Hrmmm. For our small group, we'll skip the controller almost definitely.

Should I make my Sword Mage focused on defendering? Or would I be a fool to not try to pull my own weight in killing time?

I'm inclined right now to make my control and defenses the priority, what can I do to make myself still respectable with a few attacks without gimping myself? I really can't seem to decide on powers and stat build.

For a party full of Arcane characters, a straight controller probably isn't necessary.

Swordmages are great Defender/Controllers, but building one for raw damage output tends to soak up resources very quickly. It is possible, though, to build for a strong initial punch that then transitions into a more classical defender.

Lightning Clash or Flame Cyclone are strong openers, dealing a solid chunk of damage to the enemy forces quickly. Once that's done, you can fall back to your Aegis and Frigid Blade/Luring Strike to get all defendery again.

Infidel

Flame Cyclone seems rather powerful and a no-brainer choice for any build, when I looked over things.

Any suggestions on stats and race? Standard 22 points. I think this is giving me the hardest time in deciding right now.

Mr_Rose

SAW776 wrote: »

Expert Chainfighter. But that's not actually one of the multi-class feats, its just something that boosts it for Shadar-kai.

Oh yeah. I completely ignored that section of the article because it was mostly shadar-kai only. I thought for a second that I'd missed something and CB was also wrong and letting me use the chainfighter multis when I shouldn't...

SAW776

Really though, Shadar-kai are an awesome race. So you should make him one anyway. :P

OptimusZed

Infidel wrote: »

Flame Cyclone seems rather powerful and a no-brainer choice for any build, when I looked over things.

Any suggestions on stats and race? Standard 22 points. I think this is giving me the hardest time in deciding right now.

Genasi are natural Assault Swordmages. 18/18/13 Int/Str/Con is great. Good offense, qualifies for Hide armor.

Mr_Rose

SAW776 wrote: »

Really though, Shadar-kai are an awesome race. So you should make him one anyway. :P

I'm certain I'll play a Shadar-Kai at least once, and will probably even submit one to aegeri's trans-global Eberron game, but I was just playing around with CB and came up with a half-Orc hybrid Rogue/Ranger Chainfighter. He was a foundling raised by Shadar-Kai though...

SAW776

You know, if the Assassin isn't a martial character, it is going to be incredibly odd that they can't use the two weapons introduced in the "Art of the Kill" Dragon article.

OptimusZed

SAW776 wrote: »

You know, if the Assassin isn't a martial character, it is going to be incredibly odd that they can't use the two weapons introduced in the "Art of the Kill" Dragon article.

That depends on the flavor.

Rogues fill the non-magical stealth killer niche pretty well. Making a second class with basically the same schtick doesn't make much sense. I'd expect more "you choke your target with is own shadow" type stuff.

SAW776

OptimusZed wrote: »

SAW776 wrote: »

You know, if the Assassin isn't a martial character, it is going to be incredibly odd that they can't use the two weapons introduced in the "Art of the Kill" Dragon article.

That depends on the flavor.

Rogues fill the non-magical stealth killer niche pretty well. Making a second class with basically the same schtick doesn't make much sense. I'd expect more "you choke your target with is own shadow" type stuff.

Except that the whole article is about how the feats/tools are those of assassins. So it would just be odd to be having assassins and Assassins and not have the concepts be compatible.

Really though, I think the martial requirement on the garrote is silly, as I think it would be badass for an Avenger, and I couldn't not let an Assassin use it.

Melding

what if those things are built into the assassin class?

SAW776

Melding wrote: »

what if those things are built into the assassin class?

I guess that would work, actually. Give him garrote proficiency and then give him the whole "damage while sustaining" thing. Hopefully that's how they go about it.

Melding

It is what I kinda assumed what they would do. Assassin class is for being a guy raised to kill people, feats are for people learning how to do it. Or something.

Mr_Rose

Interesting fact I just discovered; the CB implementations of the Hybrid class rules are bugged: They don't apply the bonus skills you're supposed to get for either the ranger or rogue classes. Adding house rules to fix this oversight just doubled my trained skills...

bladecruiser

Check and see if they have a post or thread on the official forums about it yet, if not, let'em know what all you did to get the error to happen so they can find the problem and fix it.

Mr_Rose

Already did that; there was a single post in an existing "CB bugs" thread about a totally unrelated error, so I made a new one just for this. I was just letting people here know in case they were trying to make Hybrid chars using the CB.

Jam Warrior

I am impressed at their dedication to updating and fixing these CB bugs and issues and to maintain it as the awesome tool it is. It has certainly massively helped bring my friends into the game by making character building and maintenance so simple and user friendly.

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Super Namicchi

you could make it a skill challenge to get them out, where failures in the challenge = a PC gets trapped

MrBeens

jdarksun wrote: »

Hey folk, I have kind of an urgent question (as this may come up in a session today).

In H2 (Thunderspire Labyrinth)...

Hall of Forced Introspection. There's nothing stating how a trapped PC can get out of the Oubliette of the Empty Mind. If all of them get captured, deus ex gnoll show up and let 'em out. But what if only one of them is trapped?

isn't there a button or something on the alter that releases anyone trapped?

Dalboz

I haven't played a D&D game in close to twenty years, but I'm encouraged to try again with the seeming reinvigoration of the franchise. My cousin and some other family and friends are now talking about having a game (mostly as a Gygax/Arneson memorial game; but still...). The thing is that I'm looking at doing it a little more regularly and am thinking of checking out one of the local RPGA delve nights. Does anyone have any experience with these or know if they're worthwhile?

SkyCaptain

It would be worthwhile to check out just to make some new friends that play D&D.

templewulf

YesNoMu wrote: »

You could use a long/short sword and a parrying dagger, too. That's what I would do, since I dislike double weapons for flavor reasons.

Since I want to go tempest fighter, they would both need to be offhand, though. Long/short swords aren't offhand, are they?

An alternative is a tempest fighter with the staff fighting feat, but I don't see a lot of synergy with anything. I give up +1 to hit, heavy blade feats, and the damage die of better weapons. I wanted to use it to create a sort of "martial monk", but it just seems mechanically lackluster. Do you even get to use both ends of the staff for opportunity attacks?

SAW776

Short swords are offhand.

Utsanomiko

Jam Warrior wrote: »

A demented idea has entered my head and I thought I'd sound it out here so I can see if, like so many of my ideas, it sounds much worse outloud than it did within the confines of my own skull.

I'm considering running the Tomb of Horrors on the board as a tournament style game. 4th it up, teams of two, first team dies horrible death, next one ploughs straight in with the benefit of having witnessed the previous carnage and so hoping to get that bit further before their own new and unique horrible death.

High score table for value of treasures recovered if people want to cut their losses part way maybe? Obviously looting of previous victim's corpses highly encouraged.

As long as interest is high enough amongst people who haven't already read the module it sounds like it could be silly fun to me, what do you guys think?

I would be on this like a hobo on a ham sandwich. The parites probably should be 3-4 PCs each, though, but I think you wouldn't have trouble getting a couple teams worth of players signing up.

SAW776

Jesus. MM2 seems to be geared towards low-level TPKs. It has a ton of low-level monsters that have healing abilities based on finishing off unconscious PCs.

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tastydonuts

SAW776 wrote: »

Jesus. MM2 seems to be geared towards low-level TPKs. It has a ton of low-level monsters that have healing abilities based on finishing off unconscious PCs.

Does this mean less thinking for me? :U

I for one think it's highly sexy for monsters to heal themselves.

edit: Let's just say 'Cannibalize' as an encounter power for undead was on the design table.

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SAW776

Huh. I could have sworn I stumbled on another non-Fell Taint creature, but now I can't find it.. still, seems like jacked up abilities to be on stuff a level-1 party will be facing.

Fell Taint Lasher, Fell Taint Pulsar, Fell Taint Thought Eater, Fell Taint Warp Wender- level 1, 2, and 4 creatures with the ability:

Fell Taint Feeding (Standard, at-will) Healing

Targets a helpless or unconscious creature; the fell taint pulsar loses insubstantial and its fly speed until the end of its next turn, and it makes a coup de grace against the target. If the pulsar kills the target, it regains all of its hit points.

Edit: Yeah, I didn't mean healing was bad, I meant the healing was gotten by killing an unconscious PC.

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tastydonuts

Hm. I'll have to look around the compendium or something whenever.

Most of the customizations that I've made to monsters include an on-death attack or effect, some means of using their one healing surge, or just general adjustments to other attributes to put it into a difficulty range that I'm shooting for. There's several things behind the scene that keep those abilities from being used at 100% effectiveness though.

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tastydonuts

Aegeri wrote: »

Also note the minion version that can gain temporary hit points.

First time I've seen that.

That was something that I often debated. It's good to see that there's an "official" thing that does that. Which makes it fair game~

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tastydonuts

The "leader" of the minions had an aura that granted the minions the temp HP. It wasn't a major gain (5 hp) but it was enough to make it so they wouldn't all die in a single AE burst.

The thing I'm toying around with now for the future is extreme weather events. Specifically, tornados and hurricanes... I have an idea for how the other large scale battlefield triggers are going to work, but a tornado kind of sticks around, yanno?

In my head now it's a huge hazard with an aura 3-5 that makes attacks vs FORT if you end your turn in it. The result of this is you get wracked with with debris for a low, set damage and prone. On-crit, you're dragged X squares for YdZ damage, mathing those out now. Contact with the eye tosses somebody in the air. It should be interesting.


edit: Z is probably going to be the safe default of 6.

TehSloth

tastydonuts wrote: »

The "leader" of the minions had an aura that granted the minions the temp HP. It wasn't a major gain (5 hp) but it was enough to make it so they wouldn't all die in a single AE burst.

The thing I'm toying around with now for the future is extreme weather events. Specifically, tornados and hurricanes... I have an idea for how the other large scale battlefield triggers are going to work, but a tornado kind of sticks around, yanno?

In my head now it's a huge hazard with an aura 3-5 that makes attacks vs FORT if you end your turn in it. The result of this is you get wracked with with debris for a low, set damage and prone. On-crit, you're dragged X squares for YdZ damage, mathing those out now. Contact with the eye tosses somebody in the air. It should be interesting.


edit: Z is probably going to be the safe default of 6.

Yeah, I was always thrown off by that leader, since the books outright said "minions die in 1-hit". Of course that's probably been errata fixed or something, but I remember using it in one of the first encounters I think I ran, and later looking at it and being like, hmm, I wasn't supposed to let them use those temp-hp, that's dumb?

For the weather stuff, glance at the sorcerer flaming sphere knock off, the level 1 daily I think. It's basically a zone of high winds (might actually be a zone of thunder?), I might be somewhat confusing that daily with the encounter power whirlwind (which I know knocks stuff prone). I'd also say moving through it causes an attack vs REF or knock prone. Hmm, knowledge nature or endurance check to reduce it's effective range by 1 for that character maybe?

tastydonuts

TehSloth wrote: »

tastydonuts wrote: »

The "leader" of the minions had an aura that granted the minions the temp HP. It wasn't a major gain (5 hp) but it was enough to make it so they wouldn't all die in a single AE burst.

The thing I'm toying around with now for the future is extreme weather events. Specifically, tornados and hurricanes... I have an idea for how the other large scale battlefield triggers are going to work, but a tornado kind of sticks around, yanno?

In my head now it's a huge hazard with an aura 3-5 that makes attacks vs FORT if you end your turn in it. The result of this is you get wracked with with debris for a low, set damage and prone. On-crit, you're dragged X squares for YdZ damage, mathing those out now. Contact with the eye tosses somebody in the air. It should be interesting.


edit: Z is probably going to be the safe default of 6.

Yeah, I was always thrown off by that leader, since the books outright said "minions die in 1-hit". Of course that's probably been errata fixed or something, but I remember using it in one of the first encounters I think I ran, and later looking at it and being like, hmm, I wasn't supposed to let them use those temp-hp, that's dumb?

For the weather stuff, glance at the sorcerer flaming sphere knock off, the level 1 daily I think. It's basically a zone of high winds (might actually be a zone of thunder?), I might be somewhat confusing that daily with the encounter power whirlwind (which I know knocks stuff prone). I'd also say moving through it causes an attack vs REF or knock prone. Hmm, knowledge nature or endurance check to reduce it's effective range by 1 for that character maybe?

There's a leader that does that? lol. I wasn't aware of that. I just paint a scenario in my head and then work the mechanics into it after.

Copying whirlwind is one way to do it, but reflavored powers have too much of a vanilla feel for what I want it to be. I try to avoid narrative disjunctions as much as reasonably possible. If I say something's going to wreck you horribly, it will. To me, fighting near a tornado should have the narrative and mechanical intensity of such a situation. The same with in a volcano, bridges, etc. The environment plays an active role in my games, even if it's indirectly (tapping healing surges from extreme temps/shock differences), or directly (hp damage from getting hit by a rock).

Rius

I love creating characters.

Hexmage-PA

Man, that Monte Cook guy has some interesting ideas, but I think I've just pinpointed the kind of thinking that made 3E into a jumble:

Monte Cook wrote:

Original Article: Action Time

I think D&D has a problem that no one really seems to complain about too much, but it bothers me personally. I've been trying to come up with solutions for it for the last six years or so and never really found any satisfying ones.

The problem involves the six-second round...I'm confident that you really can do most of the things that the game tells you that you can do in six seconds. My problem with the system is that you can't do what the game says you can do in sixty seconds. In other words, you can do a round's worth of actions in six seconds, but you can't do ten rounds of actions in a minute. You can't keep up that pace in the kinds of situations in which D&D characters find themselves.

For me, it just doesn't feel like a real battle... Unfortunately, while you can come up with plenty of solutions, none of them are very fun.

You could institute stun effects accompanying attacks over a certain damage threshold. This could work like death from massive damage, with a save after taking 10+character level points of damage in one blow (or something like that) or be stunned. Or, you could use the daze effect rather than stun.

However, you could institute a system where every three rounds (or five, or whatever feels right), characters can only take a single move action, free (non-attack) actions, and speak. This is still arbitrary and clunky, but you can use it to instill a feeling among the players that battles are confusing and chaotic by allowing them to speak only on those rounds -- they can't communicate on other rounds.

It does seem as though most players and DMs have made their peace with this problem, or haven't even really thought about it much. So instituting a change that makes the game more complex to solve a problem that most people don't mind is not a good idea. Which is why I've never put forth a solution in any of the game design I've done since 3rd Edition came out.

Still, that's no reason to give up. I know for my own games, this question is something I'm going to continue to think about.

tastydonuts

I kind of agree with him on that line of thought though. It's kind of like the anti-bunny hopping measures you find FPSes or what have you.

Implementing those sorts of limitations on a pnp game would be a horribly unfun mess though (as a DM to track, and as a player because it'd feel like a horribly tacked on limitation), so I'm glad he didn't throw something out there to address it in the books, lol.