Fire Up The Blades

I have not yet picked up any of the splat books for 4th Edition, as I figured it was easier and smarter to do so on my infrequent visits to the English side of the world, rather than paying the book’s cost in shipping fees. So instead, I have been checking out information on the books, and found an interesting tidbit in a review of the Adventurer’s Vault:

One useful inclusion is a “move the magic” ritual, that allows you to move an enchantment from one weapon to another, so if that +2 Sunblade drops on a scimitar, but you want it on a khopesh, you’re good to go.

Well, finally. I’ve been frustrated with that sort of thing for years, and it’s nice they finally added a little something to take care of it. How many times have you heard something like this during a game?

“Awesome, a +5 Holy Avenger of Ultimate Destruction! Oh wait, it’s what kind of weapon? Damn, nobody’s proficient with that, put it on the sell for healing potions pile, then…”

That whole scenario has never been in keeping with the heroic conceit in D&D. It’s difficult to feel like an epic warrior when the Sword of Angel’s Tears that you risked your life to wrench from the Hellstone turns out to be a tulwar and no one can use it without slicing their own arm off. Accidental amputations are not the things sagas are made of.

Cut down by a Demon’s Blade
By strange forces it was made

Epic, in a sense

So, this is how my latest and greatest D&D character death went down:

“Fireball!”

“Damn, failed my Reflex save. But I’m okay, I’ve still got some hitpoints left!”

“Fireball!”

“Damn, failed my Reflex save again. I’m bleeding to death, but somebody can still save me!”

“Fireball!”

"..."

So, yeah. That’s one for the ages.

Also, looks like somebody at CCF maybe done f*cked up. Check the News for 11/5. Good show, random internet angry guys.

…And Then You’ll Beg

You may have already heard about this, but check out the 8.31.2008 post here for some righteous indignation. To quote:

The fine folks at GenCon raised over $17,000 for [the Christian Children's Fund] charity, which helps starving children in impoverished areas of the world–only to have that money actually turned down by the charity. The charity refused due to the fact that the money was raised partly by the sales of Dungeons and Dragons materials, which as we all know, puts an irrevocable taint of evil on the filthy lucre that us demon-worshiping gamers might want to use to, say, donate to starving children.

…

GRAAAAAHHH!!!

Yeah, you stay classy there, CCF. With all the strides gamers have made to show the world, hey, we’re NOT the insidious cult or violence-bent lunatics that the media and religious leaders paint us out to be, it’s nice to see that that you can still go ahead and make irrational decisions based on fear, hearsay and your own ignorance. Bravo!

The best part, of course, is that the only people who lose here are the kids. I’m sure they’ll feel much better knowing that the money that could have been used to provide them with food and clean water was turned down because it came from people who like to wear funny clothes and say “prithee” a lot.

Fuck you, CCF, fuck you. I’m too pissed right now to come up with a better way to express my anger, your stupidity has literally rendered me incoherent with rage. To make up for you being jerks, this year I’ll donate extra hard to Child’s Play. Maybe I’ll send them a few copies of the D&D Core Rulebook Gift Set just to spite you.

ossuary for the misinformed
you’d end up being amazed of what you’d see inside
the wisps of knowledge denied
and to think that someone’s implied it’s a better place to reside

Geek Log, Supplemental

An interesting point I heard today, regarding the differences between 3rd and 4th editions. To quote:

“In 3E you maximized your character’s abilities, but in 4E you maximized the party’s abilities.”

Now that I think about it, that does describe a major difference between the newcomer and the old guard.

Older players are used to tweaking their individual characters to make them as powerful as possible, which sometimes leads to the detestable practice known as “being a munchkin”; making a ultra-powerful character at the expense of the other players’ enjoyment of the game. I understand that this is always a sticky situation when you allow players to customize their character. The problem with this behaviour in older versions was that it was self-fulfilling. The tougher your character, the better the chances of surviving; it’s simple math. A super-character didn’t need teammates to beat the bad guys by himself, because there was always some loophole a clever munchkin could exploit.

So, there was no real reason not to munchkin, to a certain degree. Well, other than annoying the hell out of your fellow players. And when you cater to that particular group of players, those with no real social skills and a burning desire to exploit a system, rather than those who are interested in actually playing the game, well, things can get ugly. The problem is not customization; it is, I think, more intrinsic in the nature of the mechanics, and in, sadly, human nature.

But 4th seems to have changed that. Other than minions, monsters are no longer “one-hitter quitters” who typically get off one attack and then explode into pools of reeking slime. Combats have become tactical, requiring planning and strategy instead of a bigger sword. How well you do is determined by how well you work with your party members, not how much damage you alone can dish out.

Setting up a nasty combo with an ally is far more effective than just standing there and hitting the bad guy over and over. Many of the classes synergize with each other to become greater than they would be alone. The fighter’s knockdown powers can set the rogue up for some hefty sneak attack damage. The rogue can use his powers to push the enemy in the rear closer to the paladin. The paladin can punish the enemy with his divine challenge for daring to attack the warlord, while the warlord inspires the fighter to jump back into the fray.

With the way healing works now, this only reinforces the team player aspect. Yes, you can heal yourself, so no more actual need for a dedicated healer. But you can only heal yourself once per combat for about 25% of your hit points, healing potions aren’t that great anymore, and in-combat healing is much more scarce now. A cleric or warlord can only heal twice per combat, for slightly more than that standard 25%. The essential question in combat is no longer, “How long can I stand here and just pound on my enemy before I need a heal spell?”, but has become, “How can I minimize the damage we take and maximize what the enemy takes?” The answer to that question is simple now: teamwork.

The removal of insanely powerful spells and magic items does a great deal to level the field as well. Without the sort of grandiose and over-the-top abilities that would make even Stan Lee say, “Now, that’s just silly”, players actually have to try and think about problems. No more relying on deus ex machinas to get your character out of trouble. Similarly, the simplification of the non-combat rules can only help the game. While some detractors say it will kill role-playing, I think this will actually foster a better environment for it. Less room for abuse means less time wasted on it; more roleplay, less rollplay.

There are some valid criticisms of 4th out there, and that is perfectly acceptable. That’s how the developers find out what needs to be changed. But I think the majority of 4th Edition hate is coming from longtime munchkins who have suddenly discovered that, in the new system, they can’t pull their shenanigans anymore.

And that thought alone warms my evil, evil little heart.

4th Edition: Part Deux

Well, we had our second attempt at being heroes this weekend, and frankly, my opinion on 4th has not shifted either way. I’m not sure if this is good or bad yet, but I guess it’s still too early to form any concrete impressions of the new D&D.

Two more combats, still no skill challenges, a few close calls and the discovery that the pre-built paladin isn’t very well designed ruled the evening. Also, we made it to level 2, but only after the final combat so we didn’t have a chance to play with our new abilities.

The battle inside the waterfall cave went better than we were expecting; with talk of TPK’s in our ears we tried the stealth route and managed to take out a significant number of defenders early on, making things easier on us later on. Unfortunately, by the time the dastardly Irontooth showed himself, we were running low on resources. But in true heroic fashion, we charged in … and promptly had our asses handed to us by a single goblin. Luckily, no one died, or even went negative. It was a narrow victory though, with almost everyone ending the fight with hit points in the single digits. The discovery that the paladin’s lay on hands could only be used once a day, rather than at will, also meant that we were technically cheating, although the character sheet didn’t mention that little tidbit. So perhaps the rumours of heroic sacrifices were not unfounded.

All in all, the epic fight took about 2 to 3 hours, which seemed a little long for a moderate size encounter. The second combat was smaller, but went much faster. I think at this point we started to get into the groove, with most of the choices and calculations that go with tactical combat starting to become second nature. We began to get a hold of how we could use the terrain and our abilities to our advantage; my rogue (unsuccessfully) attempted to knock someone off a cliff, the wizard threw down a sleep spell on a cluster of enemies to slow them down before they could act, and the fighter made good use of cleave to thin out minions before using his teleport racial power to menace a bow-wielding enemy up on a cliff.

Once again, I found a few things to nitpick about:

1. Lay on hands – It already burns the paladin’s healing surges instead of the target’s, why is it also limited per day by their Wisdom? And since it is, why did they give the pre-built paladin such a low wisdom?
2. Sneak attack – Why can sneak attack only be used with light blades, crossbows and slings? I agree that backstabbing someone with a halberd is a little ridiculous, but is there really an epidemic of rogues running around with claymores?
3. Tieflings – I still feel their abilities are not balanced against the other races. Fire resistance is not that great, and their other abilities pale in comparison to, say, humans or eladrin.
4. Warlocks – I understand why, in a flavour sense, warlocks only have 3 paragon paths. But every other class has 4. Come on guys, you could have easily added a generic fourth path for warlocks.
5. Saving throws – Yes, making it a flat 50% (well, technically 55% using standard probabilities) simplifies things a great deal, but it also means powers that have effects a save can end are somewhat unreliable. Maybe luck was just against us that night, but no enemy missed a save and it made things painful. Perhaps later on we’ll have ways to add penalties on the save?
6. XP table – 3rd Edition made calculating how much XP you needed very simple. Now we’re back to the old 1st/2nd edition joy of looking it up in a table. Oi vey.

At least we got to try out some skills this time; Stealth to sneak up on the bad guys, Streetwise to pull some useful info out of the townsfolk, and Insight which failed to detect a very obvious ambush because we’re terrible at it. I still want to see how the skill challenges work, but according to the DM the first is coming up soon. And it happens to be a trap, which means my rogue will the first one to be punctured, poisoned and pureed because of a botched skill check. Since I will be in Japan if and when the next session happens, we’ll have to see if I get to experience the true joy of being the thief.

Fourth Edition, first thoughts

Okay, while this is primarily a blog about my experiences in Japan, I do feel the need to geek out once in a while. So bear with me, and if you have no idea what I’m talking about you can probably just ignore this post.

So, Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. Just finished playing my first actual session; I am not going to count the D&D Experience a few months back, since that lasted less than a half-hour and consisted of two fights, one of which we never finished. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I have to say, I like it. At least, as much as I liked 3.X, or any other edition.

System wise, I like that everyone now has a variety of powers to choose from, and that nobody seems to be more or less effective in any given combat, beyond the vagaries of chance. Gone are the days when the 1st level wizard fires off a single spell, and is then useless for the rest of the day. And from the looks of it, also gone is the fighter’s tendency to become redundant at the higher levels; when the wizards and clerics can make people’s heads explode just by looking at them, who needs a guy with a sword? Everyone is (almost) always contributing, with each class being maximized in certain situations.

Combat seemed a little slow, but I think that had more to do with the fact that we had 6 PC’s, plus more monsters to provide a challenge to 6 PC’s, PLUS the fact that we were still feeling out the combat system. There was also an amazing amount of 1’s and 20’s rolled, most amusingly by the warlord rolling a 20 on a power that couldn’t benefit from it. Skill usage didn’t really come up much, and we had no skill challenges so I can’t really comment on that. The only significant skill use was Intimidate, with the warlock cowing some kobolds into not massacring my rogue after a brave charge into the heart of the enemies’ formation ended in massive blood loss and loss of consciousness. There were some failed Perception checks as well, and let’s just say that as in 3rd Edition, make sure at least one person has it as high as possible.

Playing a rogue was interesting. While we never ran into any traps and my only attempt to sneak up on something ended with us stumbling into the middle of an enemy position, I can see a lot of potential there. The rogue has access to powers that attack a variety of defenses, so you can be effective against any type of creature. Also, the combos can be interesting; at one point I used a power that allowed my rogue to move the enemy he struck so that it was now flanked, making it possible for the ranger to attack the poor bugger AND setting it up for Sneak Attacks from the both the ranger and rogue. The downside is that without your Sneak Attack class feature, you seem to do noticeably less damage than the other classes, so it requires some tactical thinking that you might not grasp at first.

There are some funny little inconsistencies, like the fact that you know “minions” are “minions”, and that you can apparently identify what a magic item is without actually knowing it is magical. But at first glance everything seems much tighter than it was in previous editions. We’ll see how it goes with part two in a few weeks.

All in all, it’s still D&D. The system is different, but there are still monsters, PC’s, traps, map grids, character sheets, copious dice rolling, and an excuse to alternately insult and applaud your friends. We’ll have to see how the system compares in the long run, but the game remains the same.